Overview

Description

COURSE DETAILS:

Selected Topics: Moral Responsibility

Important note regarding enrollment: All seats are reserved for Philosophy Graduate students. Philosophy honours students can access enrollment into this course by contacting the Philosophy Advisor (philcomm@sfu.ca). 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.

This course will provide an advanced survey of the literature on moral responsibility, including both contemporary classics (i.e. papers from the later part of the twentieth century) and current papers.  The goal is to provide familiarity with key papers and positions in the discipline as well as to gain a sense of the state of the current literature. While some of the early debates center on the “compatibility question,” the course is not about the metaphysics of free will but the conditions of moral responsibility. We will look at different types of responsibility-judgments (attributability, answerability, and accountability) and the relevance of control to those judgments.  Specific topics may include: tracing (culpability transfer), moral luck and strict answerability, group responsibility, and the epistemic condition on moral responsibility (especially the relevance of moral ignorance; also touching on doxastic responsibility.)  While the course is focused on philosophical accounts of moral responsibility, we will examine potential connections to and implications for criminal culpability and there will be opportunity to explore more law-related topics for one’s seminar paper. 

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Successful completion of this course will satisfy the "Value Theory Stream" distribution requirement toward the MA degree for Philosophy graduate students.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: