This course will challenge you to examine your life from an ethical perspective. What should your goals and values be? We are living in a world in which some enjoy many luxuries while others live in extreme poverty. Climate change poses a threat to both present and future generations, as well as to the natural environment. What should you do about these issues? Other questions to be discussed include: abortion, euthanasia; the claim that all human life has equal value; the moral status of animals; and the ethics of what we eat, concern for the long-term future, and why we should act ethically.

This course surveys a hidden canon of African American film and also uncovers the roots of representational injustice in Hollywood and the secret, but cardinal role Woodrow Wilson played in the production and distribution of Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" that led to the rebirth of the KKK. Wilson's policy of segregation was adapted by Hollywood as a self-censoring industry regulation of representation. Black people could only appear on screen as subservient and marginal characters, never as equals, partners or leaders. This industry code, Wilson's legacy, has become second nature to Hollywood.

An examination of the moral principles governing love and sex. Questions to be addressed include: Do we ever owe it to someone to love him or her? Do we owe different things to those we love? Do we owe it to a loved one to believe better of him than our evidence warrants? What is consent, and why is it morally significant? Is sex between consenting adults always permissible, and if not, why not? Are there good reasons for prohibiting prostitution and pornography? Everyone has opinions about these matters. The aim of the course is to subject those opinions to scrutiny.

This is a required course for the ten Graduate Prize Fellows (GPFs) in the University Center for Human Values. It is expected that the GPFs register for the course in both the fall and spring semesters of the year they are GPFs. The course has three central goals. First, the seminar is designed to support students' dissertation work while providing special aid to the human values aspect of the dissertation. Second, the seminar has an intensive focus on in-person academic performance skills. Third, the seminar aims to help graduate students to work toward the academic job market.

The development of Greek legal traditions, from Homer to the Hellenistic age. The course focuses on the relationship between ideas about justice, codes of law, and legal practice (courtroom trials, arbitration); and the development of legal theory.

In the twentieth century, Europe underwent a range of wrenching social and political upheavals that brought into question received truths about politics, the role of religion, the relationship between the sexes, and the place of Europe in the wider world. Over the course of the semester, we will study a range of different thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Luce Irigaray, and Jacques Derrida, examining how they responded to these upheavals and offered new ways to thinking about the world and our place in it.

Bioethics was named in 1970. Its etymology, however, is from the ancient Greek. We will put ancient and modern conceptions of human flourishing in conversation by exploring how naturalizing medicine has historically shaped the nature of birth, death, and mind. What is at stake in invoking the Greeks when constructing the ethics of modern medicine? How can reading ancient Greek texts in context help us think critically and imaginatively about ethical challenges in medicine today? We will examine how the formation of a medical tradition around the physical body creates persistent practical and philosophical questions in the clinic and beyond.

This seminar serves as an introduction to various issues in formal ethics. Our guide is John Broome's books Weighing Goods and Weighing Lives, which together advance a theory of welfare aggregation across people, under uncertainty, and over time. Topics include the following: distributive equality, the value of additional lives, ex ante vs. ex post approaches to social risk, separability and Pareto principles, the structure of betterness relations, and axiomatic foundations of utilitarianism.

American law protects racist hate speech, pornography, and (much) lying. Other countries permit more restrictions on harmful speech, should we? Or will that undermine truth-seeking, political competition, and other values? Should speech be regulated instead by social norms, social media companies, and universities? Is "cancel culture" a problem? And what should we - as political communities and universities - honor and memorialize? How should we balance recognition of heritage and inclusion of people from diverse cultures and historically marginalized groups? Seminars will include debates. Active weekly participation required of all.

With a focus on contemporary controversies in public life, this course surveys philosophical and theological perspectives on the ethos of liberal democracy oriented toward rights, equality, and freedom. For example, what do Christian beliefs and practices imply about issues related to feminism, racism, nationalism, and pluralism? What is the relationship between religious conviction, morality and law? Special emphasis on selected political and economic problems, bioethics, criminal justice, sexuality, the environment, war, immigration, and the role of religion in American culture.

A seminar on Kant's ethics, metaphysics, and social/political philosophy insofar as they relate to his thinking about religion. Kant famously criticizes traditional theistic proofs as illegitimate speculation, but his own positive project involves God in important ways, even in the Critical period. In this course, we look at the pre-Critical theology, the Critical arguments against dogmatic and ecclesiastical religion, the positive arguments for "practico- theoretical" and "moral" faith, and the roles played by the concepts of evil, grace, hope, and progress in an enlightened, moral religion.

The course examines major moral controversies in public life and competing conceptions of justice and the common good. It seeks to help students develop the skills required for thinking and writing about the ethical considerations that ought to shape public institutions, guide public authorities, and inform citizens' moral judgments in politics. We focus on issues that are particularly challenging for advanced, pluralist democracies such as the USA, including justice in war, terrorism and torture, market freedom and distributive justice, immigration, refugees, and criminal justice in conditions of social injustice.