What We Owe to Groups

This page gives the syllabus for a course I will be teaching at Haverford College in fall 2017, "What We Owe to Groups: The Ethics and Politics of Collective Life." The course revolves around one question: what should we make of the enormous privileges and terrifying demands presented by membership in groups? To view Autumn 2017 midterm evaluations of this course, please click here.

WHAT WE OWE TO GROUPS: THE ETHICS AND POLITICS OF COLLECTIVE LIFE

Prof. Thomas J. Donahue

POLSH 319

Haverford College, Fall 2017

Th 1:30-4:00

Classroom: Gest 103

Mailbox: Faculty Mailroom in Hall Building

Office Hours: W, 2-4pm, The Coop; or by apptmt

E-mail: tjdonahueAThaverford.edu

Syllabus

Where would we be without groups? Our lives are shaped and immeasurably enriched by the groups that call us members. Our nations, our families, our corporations, our political parties, our churches, our clubs, our polities, our social movements—all of these give us identities, resources, opportunities, comradeship, support, encouragement, recognition, and a sense of purpose. Some of these goods could perhaps be achieved in a world without social groups—a world of social atoms in which all goods are exchanged in one-off contracts. But it is hard to see how we could enjoy this whole embarrassment of riches without social groups. It is in large part thanks to social groups that the world enjoys such a diversity of goods. And yet it is notorious that our social groups make heavy demands on us. In the name of loyalty to a state, a church, a nation, a movement, or a corporation, countless millions of people have sacrificed their lives, their consciences, their freedom, their loved ones, their life plans, or their reputations. Moreover, every society seems to place disproportionately heavy burdens on some of its social groups. It is often argued that certain racial groups, religious groups, gender groups, economic classes, or sexuality groups are subjected to oppressive burdens not faced by other groups of that kind. From these claims of oppression and group harm, people often argue that those in the victim group have special responsibilities to be loyal to the group, to identify with it, and to make sacrifices for its uplift. People also argue that those in the beneficiary group have special responsibilities to make amends for the oppression, to make sacrifices to combat it, to feel guilt or shame for how it unjustly benefits them, and to not cry foul if they uphold the oppression and then are attacked for their complicity.

So groups provide each of us with immeasurable benefits, and they also impose enormous burdens on us all. Collective life grants to each of us enormous privileges, while at the same time laying on us terrifying demands. What then should we make of this? How much value should we give to these privileges? How do we decide which of these demands is reasonable and which unreasonable? Here, we are not asking how the state or the government should channel and regulate these privileges and demands. Those are familiar questions asked by political science and legal theory. Instead, we are asking how we as individuals should weigh and evaluate these privileges and demands. What do we as individuals owe to groups? What value should we put on the privileges they grant us, and how far should we accede to their demands?

This course will ask these questions of some of the groups that loom largest in social and political life. We will examine peoples, nations, states, citizenries, corporations, political parties, crowds, social movements, racial groups, gender groups, economic classes, and cultural groups. For each of these types of groups, we will examine leading theories of the benefits provided by membership in these groups. We will also examine leading theories of the demands they impose on us. When may a group like a political party reasonably ask a person to put her identity as a member of that group ahead of all her other identities? When may a group like a corporation ask a person to put her loyalties to the corporation above her commitments to other groups? We will also examine theories of when and how far the members are responsible for what these groups do, or the harms these groups cause.

The course is a small, research-intensive seminar. Enrollment will be strictly capped at 15 students. “Research-intensive” means that we will intersperse the substantive readings and discussion with readings and discussion of problems about doing research, posing a research problem, solving the problem, and writing up the results, drawn from Wayne Booth et al.’s The Craft of Research.

Course Requirements. To earn full credit, you must:

(1) Participate in class discussion. I know many people find this daunting. Nevertheless, try. One main aim of the course is to help you improve in argument.

(2) Submit 6 weekly response papers. Each week, you may submit a paper, of not more than 350 words, that examines some thesis that that week’s reading has argued. The paper may criticize the argument by which the reading defends the thesis, mount its own argument to refute the thesis, or mount its own argument to defend the thesis. For full credit, you need only submit 6 such papers.

(3) Submit a paper proposal. You are required to submit, in Week 8, a proposal for your final paper. The proposal should state a question concerning one of the topics covered in the course, say why the question is important, state your answer to the question (i.e., your thesis), give the key reasons by which you will defend the thesis, state two serious objections to your thesis, and state how you will respond to the objections. The proposal should be not more than 800 words long.

(4) Submit a final paper. You are required to submit, on the last day of exams, a final paper. The paper should state a question concerning one of the topics covered in the course, say why the question is important, state your answer to the question (i.e., your thesis), defend the thesis with argument, state two serious objections to your thesis, and respond to the objections. The paper should be not more than 5,000 words long.

Course Assessment. Course marks will be computed on the following distribution: Class Participation: 20%; 6 Response Papers: 36% (6 % each); Paper Proposal: 20%; Argumentative Paper: 24%

Course Objectives. By the end of the course, students should

(1) Have become familiar with and able to correctly use such key concepts of the ethics of collective life as responsibility, solidarity, fellowship, loyalty, identities, patriotism, group harm, collective responsibility, collective liability, etc. ;

(2) Have strengthened their skills in applying these concepts to current debate about the ethics of collective life;

(3) Have honed their ability to specify how and why specific values clash when dealing with the ethics of collective life;

(4) Have improved their skills in specifying the disagreement over the relevant facts involved in disagreement over these problems of collective ethics;

(5) Have learned how to accurately describe the structure of a theory, specifying its key concepts, its main claims, the basic model underlying it, and the question to which it is an answer;

(6) Have honed their skills in specifying the structures of arguments, breaking them into premises-axioms, middle premises-lemmas, and conclusions-theorems;

(7) Have improved their ability in distinguishing between similar concepts denoted by the same word and spotting equivocations;

(8) Have honed their skills in evaluating and challenging the premises of an argument with rational and well-ordered arguments of their own;

(9) Have worked out for themselves a detailed and developed argument arguing a thesis about one of the questions covered in the course;

(10) Have honed their skills in the craft of research, mastering and applying concepts like narrowing down a topic, asking a research question, posing a research problem for a specific audience, solving a research problem, drafting a research paper, revising with an audience in mind.

REQUIRED BOOKS (Available online through Tri-Co Libraries)

[1] Wayne Booth et al, The Craft of Research (UChicago Press, 2008)

[2] Tommie Shelby, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Harvard UP, 2005)

SCHEDULE

Session 1. Introduction to the Course. The Privileges and Demands Groups Place on Us.

Session 2. We the Nation, You the Nation? The Privileges and Demands of National Membership. (1) What Responsibilities Do Nations as Collectives Have For What They Have Done? (2) What Responsibilities Do Individual Members of Nations Have for What Their Nations Have Done?

David Miller, “In Defence of Nationality,” Citizenship and National Identity (Polity, 1999): 24-40; SKIP pp. 39 + 40.

David Miller, “Holding Nations Responsible” Ethics 114 (2004): 240-268; SKIP pp. 265-268

Farid Abdel-Nour, “National Responsibility” Political Theory 31 (2003): 693-719

Optional reading: David Miller, “Nationalism,” Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, ed. J. Dryzek et al (Oxford UP, 2008): 529-545

Session 3. We the State, You the State? The Privileges of State Membership and Being a Citizenry.

Christopher Morris, “The Modern State,” An Essay on the Modern State (Cambridge UP, 1998): 14-55; YOU CAN SKIP pp. 46-55

Pettit, “Three Images of the Citizenry,” in Political Theory and Australian Multiculturalism, ed. G. B. Levey (Berghahn Books, 2008): 101-118

Anna Stilz, “Collective Responsibility and the State,” Journal of Political Philosophy 19 (2011): 190-208

Optional reading: Avia Pasternak, “The Collective Responsibility of Democratic Publics,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 41 (2011): 99-123

Optional reading on whether states can act under excusable duress: Francois Tanguay-Reynaud, “Puzzling about State Excuses as an Instance of Group Excuses,” in The Constitution of the Criminal Law, ed. R. A. Duff et al (Oxford UP, 2013): 119-150

Session 4. Is Patriotism a Reasonable Demand Made by State and Citizenry?

John Schaar, “The Case for Patriotism,” Legitimacy in the Modern State (Transaction, 1981): 285-312; READ ONLY 285-300

Simon Keller, "The Case against Patriotism," in J. Kleinig, S. Keller, I. Primoratz, The Ethics of Patriotism: A Debate (Wiley, 2014): 48-72

Attracta Ingram, “Constitutional Patriotism,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 22 (1996)

Optional reading: John Kleinig, Simon Keller, Igor Primoratz, “Introduction,” The Ethics of Patriotism: A Debate (Wiley, 2014): 1-20

Session 5. (1) We the Corporation, You the Corporation? The Privileges and Demands of Corporate Membership. (2) Research: From Topics to Questions to Problems

David Ciepley, “Beyond Public and Private: Toward a Political Theory of the Corporation,” American Political Science Review 107 (2013): 139-158

Dennis Thompson, “The Problem of Many Hands,” Restoring Responsibility: Ethics in Government, Business, and Health Care (Cambridge UP, 2004): 11-32

Wayne C. Booth et al, “From Topics to Questions,” The Craft of Research, pp. 29-50

Booth et al, “From Questions to Problems,” The Craft of Research, pp. 51-67

FIRST TWO RESPONSE PAPERS DUE

Session 6. (1) The Privileges and Demands of Corporate Membership, Continued.

James Dempsey, “Moral Responsibility, Shared Values, and Corporate Culture,” Business Ethics Quarterly 25 (2015): 319-340

Christopher McMahon, “Introduction,” "The Public and the Private," Public Capitalism: The Political Authority of Corporate Executives (UPenn Press, 2012): 1-31

H. Jeff Smith, "The Shareholders vs. Stakeholders Debate," MIT Sloan Management Review (Summer 2003)

FALL BREAK

Session 7. We the Party, We the Crowd—You the Party, You the Crowd. The Privileges and Demands of Membership in Political Parties and Crowds. (2) Research: From Problems to Sources.

Russ Muirhead, “A Defense of Party Spirit,” Perspectives on Politics 4 (2006): 713-72

J. S. McClelland, "Liberalism’s Special Enemies: The Crowd and Its Theorists," A History of Western Political Thought (Routledge 1996): 661-675

Wayne Booth et al, “From Problems to Sources,” The Craft of Research, pp. 68-83

Optional reading:

Russ Muirhead, “The Case for Party Loyalty,” NOMOS LIV: Loyalty, pp. 229-256

Iris Marion Young, “Social Movements and the Politics of Difference,” Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton UP, 1990): 156-191

Session 8. We the Race, You the Race? Racial Groups: The Privileges and Demands of Membership in Them. What Do Racial Whites Owe the World?

Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 21-37

Charles W. Mills, “White Supremacy and Racial Justice,” From Class to Race (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003): 195-218

Linda Martín Alcoff, “The Whiteness Question,” Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (Oxford UP, 2006): 205-225

Optional reading: W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” (1897) in The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, and elsewhere

PAPER PROPOSAL DUE!

Session 9. (9 Nov) The Rightful Demands of Racial Membership, Continued. The Claims of Black Cultural Nationalism and Community Nationalism.

Tommie Shelby, “Class, Poverty, and Shame,” We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Harvard UP, 2005): 60-100

Shelby, “Black Power Nationalism,” We Who Are Dark, pp. 101-135

Shelby, “Race, Culture, and Politics,” We Who Are Dark, pp. 161-200

Optional reading: Tommie Shelby, “Foundations of Black Solidarity: Collective Identity or Common Oppression?” Ethics (2002)

DEADLINE TO HAVE SUBMITTED FOUR TOTAL RESPONSE PAPERS

Session 10. (16 Nov) We the Gender Group, You the Gender Group? The Privileges and Demands of Membership in Gender Groups.

Iris Marion Young, “Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective,” Signs 19 (1994): 713-738

Larry May and Robert Strikwerda, “Men in Groups: Collective Responsibility for Rape,” Hypatia 9 (1994): 134-151

Larry May and Marilyn Friedman, “Harming Women as a Group,” Social Theory and Practice 11 (1985): 207-234

Optional reading: Larry May, “Sexual Harassment and Solidarity,” Masculinity and Morality (Cornell UP, 1998): 98-115

Session 11. (23 Nov) We the Cultural Group, You the Cultural Group? The Privileges and Demands of Membership in a Cultural Group.

NO CLASS DUE TO THANKSGIVING

Session 12. (30 Nov) We the Economic Class, You the Economic Class? The Privileges and Demands of Membership in an Economic Class.

Avishai Margalit, “Why Are You Betraying Your Class?” European Journal of Philosophy 19 (2011): 171-183

G. A. Cohen, “The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 12 (1983): 3-33

Optional: Alan Patten, “Rethinking Culture: The Social Lineage Account,” American Political Science Review 105 (2011)

Session 13. (7 Dec) (1) A Bit on Cultural Groups. (2) One Identity to Rule them All? The Benefits and Burdens of Identity Politics

Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Trouble with Culture,” The Ethics of Identity (Princeton UP, 2005): 114-120, 130-154

Amartya Sen, “Making Sense of Identity,” Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (Norton, 2006): 18-39

James Tully, “Identity Politics,” in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought, ed. Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy (Cambridge UP, 2003): 517-533

Optional reading: Kwame Anthony Appiah, "The Politics of Identity," Daedalus 135 (2006): 15-22

Session 14. (1) The Demands of identity. (2) When Is It Reasonable to Accept Guilt, Responsibility, or Punishment for What One’s Group Has Done?

Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Demands of Identity,” The Ethics of Identity (Princeton UP, 2005): 62-113

Juha Raikka, “On Dissociating Oneself from Collective Responsibility,” Social Theory and Practice 23 (1997): 93-108

Daryl Levinson, “Collective Sanctions,” Stanford Law Review (2003)

Optional reading: Margaret Gilbert, “On Feeling Guilt for What One’s Group Has Done,” Living Together: Rationality, Sociality, and Obligation (Rowman& Littlefield, 1996): 375-390

DEADLINE FOR SIX TOTAL RESPONSE PAPERS

FINAL PAPER DUE DECEMBER 22 AT NOON VIA E-MAIL.