John Buchanan
buchanjb@my.yorku.ca

Virtual office hours: every Thursday, 10:30-11:20AM, held on Zoom (meeting link, meeting pass code: 1785)

This course is an introduction to some basic topics in ethics: What should we be doing with our lives? Why should we not just be selfish? Is anything wrong for us to do? What does it even mean for a choice to be wrong? Without God, is right or wrong just a matter of opinion?

No prior knowledge of ethics or of philosophy more broadly is presupposed by this course. You are encouraged to come with your own thoughts on these and other questions but you will be asked to critically reflect on your own views and on the wide literature of serious, scholarly attempts to answer those philosophical questions.

Technical requirements for taking the course: You will need a computer that can access eClass in order to see all course materials and to submit some of your assignments. For how to access your courses on eClass.

Russ Shafer-Landau, 2023, The Fundamentals of Ethics (6^th edition), Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780197697474

Tutorial Participation: 20%, See your Class Schedule for when/where your tutorials are
Weekly Responses: 50%, Due: every Monday, 11:59PM (only five are counted, 10% each)
Final Exam: 30%, Date TBD

This course consists of a weekly lecture and weekly tutorial, followed by an in-person exam at the end of the term. What you will be expected to do for this course is as follows:

Tutorial Participation: You are expected to come to the lectures and tutorials ready to share your thoughts on that week’s readings. Attendance and participation is one of the main factors in getting a good grade on any assignment in a course like this but you will also be assessed directly on your participation in tutorials. Your TA will tell you in your first tutorial what you need to do for that portion of your grade since how participation is assessed is entirely up to them.

Weekly Responses: Each week you will have a chance to submit on eClass a short response to the reading that was assigned for that week. Only your five highest marks among these responses will be counted toward this portion of your grade. For that reason, you do not need to submit a response every week. That said, I strongly advise you to submit at least two responses by Reading Week.

For each response, you will pick an argument from the reading, summarize that argument entirely in your own words, then analyze that argument in a critical and creative way. The latter critical analysis could be a criticism of one of your chosen argument’s steps, a defense of one of that argument’s assumptions, an investigation into its implications (concerning or promising implications), or some other form of analysis that creatively goes beyond what the book has already said yet also grapples seriously with the argument you summarized (crucially, an analysis needs to do more than just voice your opinion on the matter). This whole response to the readings must be no more than 800 words. There is no minimum word count but your summary should not leave out any key points from the argument you summarized.

You must submit this response the day before the lecture for that reading. The point of this assignment is to prepare you for discussion of that reading in lecture the next day and to regularly give you a chance to show how well you can grapple with philosophical ideas without the help of me or your TA.

Final Exam: There will be an in-person exam held during the final exam period. This exam will consist of short-answer and long-answer questions from a list that will be circulated in advance: short-answer questions will be more descriptive (asking you to show how well you understood a position); long-answer questions will be more evaluative (asking you to defend your own position on a topic).

The core goal of this course is to help you develop a basic understanding of major positions in ethics, so positions on what is right or wrong for us to do and on how we should live. You should come away with a broad view of the different positions philosophers have taken on how morality relates to religion and to personal opinion as well as on the role of happiness and pleasure in living a good life. You should also acquire a familiarity with a number of positions that philosophers have defended on the basic commitments of morality, positions that include Consequentialism, Kantian Ethics, Virtue Ethics, Care Ethics, and Contractarianism.

A further goal of this course is to help you become more familiar with how to write and think philosophically, so with how to defend a position on questions that have no easy answers or on topics about which even the most well-informed people have disagreed for centuries. You will be practicing both the interpretation of arguments for such positions and the articulation of your own arguments for such positions. While that critical engagement with philosophical questions will only cover topics in ethics, the philosophical skills of clarifying ideas and assessing arguments that you will practice there apply to any philosophical topic (mind and consciousness, freedom and determinism, logic, death, God, the nature of reality, etc.). You are expected to develop these broader philosophical skills alongside learning about major positions on morality, life, and other ethical topics.

Course policies

Submitting Assignments: All of the ‘Weekly Response’ assignments will be submitted on eClass. Each response has its own submission portal, ordered by week on the above Reading Schedule and labelled by the chapter to which you are responding. You are responsible for submitting on time, in the right place, and on the assigned topic, since all of that information is laid out for you on eClass.

Missed Assignments: The accommodation for missing one of these assignments is that you do not need to write a response every week and there are other weeks when you can write instead. You are responsible for starting to write these early enough that you can safely miss a few. However, I will be sending out emails to any students who remain enrolled in the course but have not submitted at least two responses by Reading Week, since you should receive at least 15% of your grade before the drop deadline on Nov 4^th. If you are having trouble keeping up with the course, please get in touch with me by email so we can talk about your situation and work out accommodations that are fair to both you and to the other students in the course. The earlier you reach out the more I can do to help you.

Citing Sources: You are not expected to rely on any materials other than what is on the eClass page for this course and is in the assigned book, The Fundamentals of Ethics. You do not need to cite this book, since both me and your TA know what is or is not said in the book. If you wish to use other sources than that book, however, you must cite those sources explicitly. Feel free to use any citation style you want in your responses, as long as you provide enough information to find that source. You are of course not expected to cite any sources at the in-person exam.

Cheating: Everything that you submit for this course must be your own work, written entirely by you. Submitting text that you have copied from somewhere else online, from a friend, or from someone paid to write for you is cheating. It is still cheating even if you only take a few lines and fill the rest in with words of your own or even if you rewrite it (replacing words from text that you copied is still copying, just with the aid of a thesaurus). Submitting text that you generated using ChatGPT or other LLMs is also cheating. You are responsible for submitting nothing other than words written by yourself and cheating will be handled according to York University’s policies for Academic Honesty.