The focus this semester will be on justice. We will discuss issues such as what people deserve, what limits there are to the authority of the government, what we owe to one another in our interpersonal lives, whether the market is sufficient to provide justice, whether we are morally equal and, if so, what this means for how we distribute social goods. Concretely, we will discuss the justice of affirmative action, health care, and taxation.

This semester’s version of Environmental Ethics will focus on the ethical problems posed by the fact of climate change. The anthropogenic warming of the planet poses a threat to humans, non-human animals, and the broader ecosystem. It also raises issues of distributive justice, as the benefits and harms of climate change are not fairly allocated between races, classes, genders, and generations. We must also weigh the rightness of the various solutions that have been proposed.