Philosophy 250
Environmental Ethics
Section 01: MWF 10-10:50am 307 Friends Hall Spring 2005
Section 01: MWF 11-11:50am 307 Friends Hall Spring 2005
Overview: Philosophy 250 is a critical examination of various moral problems raised when considering environmental issues. Questions regarding the moral status of animals, future generations, and the environment as a whole are explored. Also taken up are the moral aspects of famine relief, population control, and resource use. These issues, and others, generate challenging and fundamental questions of moral philosophy: What is the basis of obligation? Do animals have rights? What does it mean to say something is intrinsically valuable? Throughout the course we will examine competing views on each of these issues; the aim will be for students to think critically about these views, so that they may come to know first-hand what is required of a well-reasoned response to the course’s questions.
Professor: Craig Duncan
Email: cduncan@ithaca.edu
Homepage: http://www.ithaca.edu/faculty/cduncan
Office hours and location: Dillingham 213, Mon 2-3 & Thurs 11-12
Office phone: 274-3580
Course Materials:
· Louis P. Pojman, Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Applications, 4th edition (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 2005) (please get this edition).
· A short coursepack to be purchased from the Philosophy and Religion Department.
Course Requirements:
· Quizzes: Over the course of the term there will be eight unannounced quizzes, each lasting 6 minutes. Your top six scores will be averaged together to form your quiz average; this will count for 15% of your grade. There will be no make-up quizzes given. This means that people who must unavoidably miss class due to extracurricular activities (e.g. athletics) will have to work hard to ensure they score well on the quizzes they are able to take.
· “Ethics Court” Debate: Four times in the term we will devote a class period to a debate regarding a case relevant to the course. The debate will be modeled on the style of debate that takes place in a Supreme Court hearing. Four students will serve as “advocates” for a position (two on each side) and two as judges. A 5 page written essay will be one component of this activity. More details will be given out shortly. This activity is worth 15% of your overall grade.
· The Moral Conversation Project. See the final page of the syllabus for an extended explanation of this. Your journal will be due on the day of the final exam. It will count for 10% of your overall grade.
· Midterm exam. There will be a midterm exam on Wednesday, March 2nd. It will count for 20% of your overall grade.
·
Final exam: There will be a final exam that counts 30%
toward your overall grade. The exam
will cover material from the entire course.
Final exam time and place to be announced.
· Class Discussion: Philosophy cannot be passively learned. It requires active engagement, both with the texts and with individuals in the form of discussion. For this reason class participation counts for 10% of your overall grade. In order to get a good participation grade, you must have excellent attendance (I will keep track of this), do the assigned reading for each class period, and take an active role in class discussions.
Note: I
do not permit extra credit assignments.
The difficulty of designing and administering these assignments makes me
unwilling to offer the opportunity to all students, and it would be unfair to
offer the opportunity merely to some students.
Order of Readings
Dates and page numbers of reading assignments for each class period will be announced in the previous class period or sooner. This will allows us the flexibility to spend more time on subjects that the class finds interesting and/or difficult, and less time on other subjects. If you miss a class, you will be responsible for learning the reading assignment for the next class, if you do not already know. Email a classmate or me for this information.
Online readings (marked with a “W”) are available via a link on the online coursepage (get to this via a link from my homepage listed above). Readings on reserve (marked with a “R”) can be obtained via the library’s homepage (click on “Course Reserves” under the “Services” heading, then click on “Duncan, Craig” from the pull-down “Instructors” menu). Readings marked with a “CP” are in the coursepack.
1. Ethics –
General Reflections
John Rawls, “Some Remarks About Moral Theory” (handout)
Frederik Kaufman, “Moral Philosophy and the Environment” (CP)
2. Nature and
Culture
Pojman, Chapter 1: Western Philosophy of Nature: The Roots of Our Ecological Situation
Pojman, Chapter 5: The Non-Western World and Environmental Philosophy
Jared Diamond, “New Guineans and the Natural Environment” (CP)
3. The Question
of Animal Minds
In-class Video
Descartes, “Animals are Machines” (W)
Steven M. Wise, “Chimpanzee and Bonobo Minds” (R)
D. R. Griffin, “Windows on Animal Minds” (R)
Clive D. L. Wynne, “The Soul of the Ape” (W)
Peter Carruthers, “Brute Experience” (R)
Colin Allen, “Star Witness” (CP)
4. Animal Rights
Pojman Chapter 2: Animal Rights
Peter Singer and Richard Posner, “Animal Rights” (W)
Elizabeth Anderson, “Animals Rights and the Values of Nonhuman Life” (CP)
5. Philosophical
Theories of Nature
Pojman Chapter 3: Philosophical Theories of Nature
James Rachels, “Drawing Lines” (CP)
Thomas E. Hill, Jr., “Ideals of Human Excellence and Preserving the Natural Environment” (CP)
Pojman Chapter 4: Preservation of the Species, Nature, and Natural Objects
6. Obligations to Others
Pojman, Chapter 6: Obligations to Future Generations
Pojman Chapter 7: Population: General Considerations
Pojman Chapter 8: Population and World Hunger
Jeffrey D. Sachs, "Helping the World's Poorest" (W)
Gregg Easterbrook, "Safe Deposit" (R)
7. Problems and Applications
Pojman Chapter 9: Pollution
Pojman Chapter 11: Atmospheric Conditions: The Greenhouse Effect
Robert Ehrlich, “Should You Worry About Global Warming?” (CP)
David Pimental, “Skeptical of the Skeptical Environmentalist” (R)
Peter Singer, “One Atmosphere” (CP)
Pojman Chapter 12: Economics and the Environment
Paul Krugman, Enemies of the WTO (W)
Pojman, Chapter 13: Ecology and Global Justice
Pojman, Chapter 14: From Dysfunctional to Sustainable Society
Teaching Policies:
Attendance
In my lectures I will often introduce material that is not covered in the reading assignments. You will be held responsible for knowing this material. If you do not come to class, you will not know this material, and your performance on essays and exams will suffer. So come to class.
Also, attendance is a significant
part of your class participation grade.
Everyone is allowed two absences, no questions asked. Absences beyond that will begin to chip away
your participation grade. Prior to the
start of each class, there will be an attendance sheet for you to sign at my
desk. If you do miss class, do the
assigned reading straight away and ask your fellow students whether you can
copy their notes from lecture. After having studied these notes, you
may ask me questions about items you don't understand.
Academic Conduct
Students are expected to conform to the Standards of Academic Conduct printed in the Student Handbook. Please familiarize yourself with these. Violations will be reported to the Ithaca College Conduct Review Board. Additionally, you will receive a grade of zero on any assignment that is not completed according to these standards. On that same note, please turn off your cell phones before entering the classroom. Plagiarism is one very serious violation of these standards. I will not tolerate it. There are good reasons for my zero-tolerance policy—reasons well summarized by the philosopher Hugh LaFollette, from whom I quote below:
Why Shouldn't I Plagiarize?
(1) It undercuts the aims of education. If you plagiarize you will not learn the skills you should learn—you are merely copying someone else's words and ideas—and you already knew how to do that.
(2) It is theft. And all theft is wrong, whether or an idea or an object.
(3) You harm other students. By plagiarizing you make professors more suspicious of students. This encourages them to make assignment that are plagiarism-proof rather than ones that are educationally sound.
(4) You will get caught. Think about it for a minute: if you plagiarize from a good source—one that is likely to help you with your grade—the prof may well know (or can easily find) the source. And if your writing style changes drastically from sentence to sentence or from paper to exam, that will be obvious even to a casual observer. To plagiarize well—to plagiarize in a way that is likely to land you a decent grade and minimize the chance you will get caught—you would have to know the material so well that it would easier—and more educationally beneficial—to write the essay yourself.[1]
Classroom Behavior.
I care about your education, and I put a lot of time into preparing lectures and classroom activities. Hence it is disrespectful not to give me your attention in class. If you cannot do this, please stay home.
The Moral Conversation Project
The issues we will study in this course are extremely difficult issues. Since we have such a short time, do not expect to emerge from the course with a settled view on each of the course’s issues; in fact, you will probably emerge from the course thinking that the answers to at least some of the issues are less clear-cut than you had hitherto imagined.
Since you will not walk away with a settled view of each issue we study, the value of the course does not lie in giving you such views. Instead, the course’s value lies in sharpening your abilities to reason well about ethical issues—that is, its value lies in equipping you with the mental tools you need to begin the process of piecing together well-reasoned responses to ethical issues. Another value of the course is that it will give you practice in reasoning about these issues with other people—in particular, with other people who may not initially be inclined to view matters as you do. Being able to converse and reason with others who hold different views is an absolutely essential skill to have in a democracy like ours, composed as it is of many different types of people.
In short, the course aims to improve both your moral reasoning skills and your moral conversation skills. The Moral Conversation Project is designed to further both of these aims. As part of this project, you will on three different occasions in the term be assigned a conversation partner. On each occasion, you must contact your partner in person, by phone, or by email (email addresses will be provided) to set up an hour long meeting outside of class time. During your meeting, you will discuss questions given to you by the professor. For each conversation you will record an entry in your “Moral Conversation Journal”—a blue Ithaca College examination book that you will be provided to you. Each journal entry should have the following format:
· Pre-conversation reflection (2 pages): Record here your initial reactions to the discussion questions.
· Conversation report (3 pages): Summarize here some of the main features of your conversation—points on which you and your partner agreed or disagreed, points on which you and your partner expressed confusion or uncertainty, points on which you and your partner felt you needed further information, points your partner raised that you had never thought of before, etc.
· Post-conversation reflection (2 pages): Record here your reactions to the discussion. Did your views change in any way? (There is of course no requirement that they do change, but you may in fact find that they do some of the time.) Are you more or less optimistic that there is a best answer to the discussion questions? Did you find the conversation comfortable or uncomfortable? And so on.
It goes without saying that you should make an effort to write legibly. You will not hand in your journal until the day of the final exam, by which time all three conversations will have taken place.