Ph.D. Candidate
Rutgers University Department of Philosophy
Curriculum Vitae
I'm
a fifth-year graduate student at Rutgers. This fall, I'll be starting
as an assistant professor at the University of Toronto. Since I no
longer have to advertise myself to prospective employers, I thought I'd
take this space to advertise my grad seminar to any Toronto grad
students who might be checking out this page. Here's the course
description:
Taxonomy and Meta-Taxonomy in Normative Ethics
The profitability and direction of our ethical theorizing are, to a significant degree, dependent upon the way we "set up" ethical debates – e.g. the stock of basic concepts we employ, and the axes along which we distinguish substantive positions. In this course, we shall focus on such taxonomical matters. Among the questions will be: How should we think about the relationship between deontic notions like obligation, supererogation, etc. and evaluative notions like goodness and betterness? What distinguishes "moral particularists" from "moral generalists"? How should we distinguish various forms of "subjective" rightness from "objective" rightness? What are the different ways of interpreting the claim that two items are incomparable or incommensurable? How should we think about the relationship between reasons and rationality? Are all or most purportedly "meta-ethical" positions representable as positions within normative ethics? We will also consider some questions about our practice of taxonomizing ethical concepts and positions: Do some ways of dividing up conceptual space "carve nature" at the normative "joints"? To what extent should the distinctions in our taxonomy correspond to distinctions in ordinary language? What makes it the case that two people are disagreeing about a substantive matter in ethics, rather than a) employing two different concepts, or b) using two different ways of expressing the same concepts? Among the authors whose works we may read are: John Broome, Shelly Kagan, Maggie Little, Michael Stocker, Derek Parfit, Frances Kamm, Susan Wolf, Jamie Dreier, Ruth Chang, Wlodek Rabinowicz, Ronald Dworkin, Mark Schroeder, Niko Kolodny, and Elizabeth Anderson .
[The list of authors may change; I haven't written up the syllabus yet. If you have any questions, please e-mail me. My address is on my CV, linked above.]
The profitability and direction of our ethical theorizing are, to a significant degree, dependent upon the way we "set up" ethical debates – e.g. the stock of basic concepts we employ, and the axes along which we distinguish substantive positions. In this course, we shall focus on such taxonomical matters. Among the questions will be: How should we think about the relationship between deontic notions like obligation, supererogation, etc. and evaluative notions like goodness and betterness? What distinguishes "moral particularists" from "moral generalists"? How should we distinguish various forms of "subjective" rightness from "objective" rightness? What are the different ways of interpreting the claim that two items are incomparable or incommensurable? How should we think about the relationship between reasons and rationality? Are all or most purportedly "meta-ethical" positions representable as positions within normative ethics? We will also consider some questions about our practice of taxonomizing ethical concepts and positions: Do some ways of dividing up conceptual space "carve nature" at the normative "joints"? To what extent should the distinctions in our taxonomy correspond to distinctions in ordinary language? What makes it the case that two people are disagreeing about a substantive matter in ethics, rather than a) employing two different concepts, or b) using two different ways of expressing the same concepts? Among the authors whose works we may read are: John Broome, Shelly Kagan, Maggie Little, Michael Stocker, Derek Parfit, Frances Kamm, Susan Wolf, Jamie Dreier, Ruth Chang, Wlodek Rabinowicz, Ronald Dworkin, Mark Schroeder, Niko Kolodny, and Elizabeth Anderson .
[The list of authors may change; I haven't written up the syllabus yet. If you have any questions, please e-mail me. My address is on my CV, linked above.]