Teaching

Spring 2027 Graduate Seminar

Title: Ethics Beyond Action
Meetings: Mondays 9:30 - 12:15 PM
Description: The overarching question for this seminar is: “To what extent does morality concern not only how we should act but also what we should value, feel, desire, intend, believe, and aim at?” We’ll critically assess the view that morality is concerned exclusively with voluntary action, given that much of contemporary moral theorizing presupposes that we can morally assess only what is under our voluntary control. Indeed, some philosophers (e.g., George Sher) go so far as to suggest that the mind is a morality-free zone. We’ll explore at least three challenges to this narrow conception of morality’s scope.

First, we’ll ask whether attitudes such as racist beliefs, sadistic desires, and malicious intentions can be morally wrong even when they are beyond our voluntary control. Does our inability to adopt or abandon an attitude at will preclude it from being morally wrong, and wrong independently of its leading (or even being likely to lead) to action?

Second, we’ll consider whether we owe others something beyond voluntary acts and omissions. We might, for example, owe someone a sincere apology. Yet sincerity requires more than simply voluntarily saying “I’m sorry”: it also requires feeling contrition and expressing that contrition by speaking those words. But one cannot come to feel contrition at will. What, then, should we make of moral requirements to perform these sorts of mixed acts, which involve both a voluntary act component and a non-voluntary attitude component?

Third, we’ll examine whether morality must extend beyond action if it’s going to address the problem of collective harm. As Christopher Kutz observes, “the most important and far-reaching harms…of contemporary life [such as those stemming from climate change] are the products of collective actions, …and individual agents rarely make a difference to [either the severity of these harms or the likelihood of] their occurrence” (2000, 113). Climate change provides a pressing example. Sometimes, an individual makes no difference because a harm is overdetermined—that is, the actions of others are sufficient to produce the given harm regardless of what that individual does. Some philosophers argue that an adequate response to such overdetermined harms requires looking beyond the moral assessment of actions. Even if an individual’s act is not itself wrong because it makes no difference to the outcome, the individual might nevertheless violate a moral requirement governing, perhaps, a conditional intention concerning how they would act if they could make a difference.

The course will culminate in an opportunity to participate in an international ethics conference that will be held on April 30 and May 1, 2027, at the University of Notre Dame: the Ethics at Notre Dame symposium (ENDs). Students are encouraged, but not required, to participate.

Syllabus: Tentative Syllabus, which still needs to be updated.

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