Politics and Ethics

Catalog description

This course is designed to investigate the relationship, if any, between ethics and politics. During the semester, we’ll examine texts of political, social, and feminist theory as well as case studies, dialogues, novels, non-fiction essays, short stories, newspaper and magazine articles and film to critically engage with questions such as: Can politics be a moral enterprise or is it a realm where violence, deception and cruelty are and must be routine? How do we judge whether a political act is ethical or unethical? Does the context of war negate the moral precepts that hold in peacetime? Do national borders mark the place where our moral commitments to others end? Who’s included in the “we” that determines the content of moral judgments and the reach of our ethical obligations? How do inequalities of wealth, power and the burden of history help determine whose pain counts and whose voices are heard in moral arguments? Along the way, we’ll examine whether and to what extent the diverse genres, style and form of these texts influences how receptive we are the perspectives and arguments they contain. We’ll also consider how our class discussions might serve as experiments in what it means to think, argue and act ethically with one another.