PHIL 322: History of Ethics

Summer Semester 2014 | Day | Burnaby

INSTRUCTOR: Evan Tiffany, WMC 5652 (etiffany@sfu.ca)

REQUIRED TEXTS

• Kant's Ethical Philosophy (Hackett Publishing)
• Guyer, Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (Continuum)
• Select readings available on Blackboard

RECOMMENDED TEXT

• J.B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge University Press)

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This course shall focus on ethical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, with an eye to his historical predecessors from the late sixteenth through to the eighteenth century.  It is this age that saw the development of modern science; and the philosophies that arose from efforts to aid or resist this new scientific understanding of the world continue to influence thought both inside and outside the academy.  One of the central themes of the course is the movement away from the traditional view of morality as obedience to law and toward an understanding of morality as self-governance.  Kant’s moral philosophy in particular can be seen as a radicalization of this basic idea, culminating in the “discovery” or “invention” (depending on one’s metaphysical orientation) of the autonomy of the will.  We will spend roughly the first half of the course looking at this development of ideas through such figures as Montaigne, Suarez, Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, Pufendorf, Hume, Rousseau, and Wolff.  In the second half of the course, we will take an in-depth look at Kant’s moral philosophy, particularly regarding the nature of autonomy and its relation to the moral law.  While it was common, at least throughout the twentieth century, to read Kant’s Groundwork as a work of normative ethics and to understand the categorical imperative as a quasi-mechanical decision procedure for determining right actions, it is now generally accepted by Kant scholars that the Groundwork is a work of metaethics, and the categorical imperative is not simply a deontological analogue of something like the principle of utility.  To get Kant’s first-order normative views, one must read the Metaphysics of Morals, which we will do at the end of the course, focusing especially on the Doctrine of Virtue and his oft-misunderstood views on the morality of lying.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS

• Low-stakes assignments 15%
• 4 short writing assignments 15% each
• Final exam 25%

Prerequisites: One of PHIL 120W, 150, 151, 220