The course is inspired by a question raised by Tim Mulgan: What would it take for ethics to be able to address a situation of “living in a broken world: a place where resources are insufficient to meet everyone’s basic needs, where a chaotic climate makes life precarious and where each generation is worse off than the last”? Is ethics as we know it – be it deontology, be it utilitarianism – part of the problem rather than the solution?
We will discuss these issues from various points of view: one leaning on virtue ethics (Peterson), another on “ecological existentialism” (Rose), still another on an interspecies, human-animal orientation (Willett), all of them calling into question the ethical and cultural hegemony of anthropocentrism, yet pointing in different directions for a viable alternative of the sort seen as required by Mulgan.
Literature
Jamieson, Dale, Reason in a Dark Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Mulgan, Tim, Ethics for a Broken World. London: Routledge, 2014.
Peterson, Anna L., Everyday Ethics and Social Change. New York: Columbia, University Press, 2009.
Rose, Deborah Bird, Wild Dog Dreaming. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011.
Vetlesen, Arne Johan, Cosmologies of the Anthropocene. London: Routledge, 2019.
Willett, Cynthia, Interspecies Ethics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.