Overview

Description

COURSE DETAILS:

Selected Topics: Normativity and Law

[Note: this course is to be taught concurrently with PHIL 421W.]  

Important note regarding enrollment: All seats are reserved for Philosophy Graduate students. Enrollments from other departments will be considered only upon submission of the Graduate Course Add Form, and with instructor's permission. All such enrollments will be done in or after the first week of classes.

The M’Naghten rule regarding insanity holds that a person is non-culpable for some action if, due to mental disease, they are incapable of knowing that they ought not to have performed that action.  But how are we to understand the force of that ‘ought’?  Is it a legal ‘ought’?  A moral ‘ought’?  Suppose you are a public official charged with enforcing a law that you believe to be morally abhorrent.  Do you have an obligation to enforce that law?  What is the nature and source of that obligation?  Is it possible to have a genuine legal obligation to do enforce an unjust law?  These questions are fundamentally about the domain of metaethics philosophers call “normativity,” and its relation to “jurisprudence” or the philosophy of law.  In this course we will be particularly concerned with questions regarding the normative authority of morality and (positive) law.   

The course will begin with a historical look at the Early Modern natural law tradition, focusing on its development in the early modern period through such writers as Suarez, Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Locke.  As these philosophers had a law-conception of morality, one of the central questions that animated their thinking was how to account for the distinctive force of Law or command as opposed to mere counsel.  As one moves later in the nineteenth and twentieth century, this law-conception of morality gives way to more naturalistic or autonomy-based conceptions of morality.  This shift gives rise to other questions such as whether the conceptual framework inherited from the natural law tradition is still appropriate, or what provides moral norms their authority.  With the rise of positivist jurisprudence in the last half of the twentieth century, similar questions arise regarding the authority of legal obligations.   In the second and third parts of the course, we will look at more contemporary attempts to grapple with these questions in normativity and jurisprudence.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Successful completion of this course will satisfy the following stream distribution requirement toward the MA degree for Philosophy graduate students:

Primary stream: Value
Secondary stream: History

(The default stream is value.  Students can devise a plan, in consultation with the instructor, at the beginning of the semester to take the course for history credit.  However, students must choose one or the other; it is not possible to get credit for both streams.) 

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: