Teaching

Ethics in Business

This class will investigate key foundational issues concerning the aims and responsibilities of business and the moral justification and moral limits of markets. Among the central questions we will discuss are: What are the aims of businesses? Who should firms serve? What moral duties and obligations apply to companies and their members? What are the moral foundations and the moral limits of competitive markets and private property? What role, if any, should laws and regulation play in business practice? 

If successful, the class will allow you to identify the complexities and nuances surrounding the questions described above and to recognize your own ambiguities with respect to them. This will likely make you uncomfortable, but if you don’t retreat into an “everything holds” position, it will make you wiser. 

The Ethics of Competition: Business and Sport

If aspiring to make money and to win a game is constitutive of running a business and playing a sport, respectively, what is the place for ethics in each of these endeavors? In this comparative course we will explore some of the most influential theories that have been offered to respond to this question, theories that end up denying a place for morality in business or sports to those that make morality a central component of these endeavors. The many parallels between business and sports will allow us to understand better what a business and a sport is, and to use the insights we gain by reflecting on one of these activities to think critically and creatively about the other. 

Thoughts experiments: An introduction to philosophy

Thought experiments are devices of the imagination that we use to inquire into the nature of things. Imagining whether our waking life is merely a dream provides insights into the nature of reality. Reflecting on whether a Martian without a sense of smell ever comes to know all that there is about what it is to smell can teach us about what it is to know and perceive something. Considering that if you change every plank of a ship, one by one, it is not clear at what point do you actually have a new ship, helps us to recognize important things about the nature of identity. 

Thought experiments provide us with a window into the most important areas of philosophy and allow us to engage in the paradigmatic styles of investigation that characterize philosophical thinking. As such, thought experiments serve as an introduction into the main topics with which philosophy is concerned, to the modes of philosophical inquiry and to the distinctive ways in which philosophy makes progress. 

Being Good and Doing Good: Moral Philosophy Meets Empirical Psychology

Did you know that if you are asked to provide help to a person as you exit a public bathroom you are much more likely to help than if you are asked as you walk across a hall? or that you are less likely to cheat on a test if you are asked right before the test to list the first 7 commandments than if you are asked to list the last seven presidents? 

In this course we will investigate cutting-edge research in psychology that upends deeply held convictions about our moral behavior. We will examine the implications that this research has in our moral landscape by examining the contributions of both psychologists and philosophers to this body of research. In particular, the course aims to familiarize students with several important areas of research in social psychology, behavioral economics, and cognitive science which reshape, question, or complement traditionally views held by moral philosophers. 

The main topics on which we will focus our attention are: 

1.     Moral Intuitionism 

2.     Automaticity of higher mental processes 

3.     The power and limitations of consciousness and speech. 

"How should one live?"; Ancient Eastern and Western Responses

What is the aim of life? What is it to live an excellent human life? And how does one go about living such a life? We will examine the response to this question offered by four schools of thought, two from the Eastern tradition (the early Buddhist tradition of the Pali canon and the Vedic tradition discussed by the Upanishads) and two from the Western tradition (the Stoic tradition as defended by Seneca and the Epicurean tradition put forth by Epicurus and subsequently defended by Lucretius). After discussing the basic tents of these four schools of thought we will pay close attention to what they have said about the way in which our attitude towards death shapes and determines our capacity to live well and the way in which our passions and our pleasures contribute to and interfere with our flourishing. This course can serve as an introduction to ancient philosophy or as an introduction to ethics. 

"Who am I?" Reflections on Agency, Identity and Unconscious Activity

The course will attempt to explain the nature of the question “Who am I?” through an investigation of different philosophical accounts that have been proposed to understand it: what it is asking, how one goes about responding it, and why it is important. We will pay particular attention at the way in which the question about our identity is connected with our own agency and our unconscious activity. Among the authors that we will read are: Derek Parfit, Paul Ricoueur, Judith Butler, Christine Korsgaard, Matthew Boyle and Jonathan Lear. 

Philosophical Perspectives: Plato, Aristotle, and Bhagavad Gita

What is it to live an excellent life? What is the relationship between living an excellent life and being moral? And how do we make ourselves into excellent human beings? These three main questions will occupy us in this course. We will investigate different responses to it through careful readings of some highly influential classical texts: The Apology, The Republic, Nicomachean Ethics, and The Bhagavad Gita. The course will be a highly collaborative, writing-intensive class where we will discuss texts collectively in class.

Latin American Philosophy; a Historical Survey

The course attempts to introduce students to some of the most influential Latin American thinkers at different historical periods. Among the central questions that we will discuss as we engage with their thought are: what is the nature of Latin America, how one ought to characterize Latin American identity, what kind of intellectual work do Latin American thinkers pursue and what have been the contribution of this thinkers to philosophy and the humanities at large. In responding to these questions we will come to see the importance that Latin America’s own history plays in the response that we try to give to all of these questions. 

Latin American Philosophy in the 20th Century

The course aims to familiarize students with the work of some of the most influential Latin American philosophers in the 20th century. The course is divided in three sections. The first aims to introduce students to the Latin American tradition and to the idea of a “Latin American Philosophy”. Then we will explore some influential responses to the question: why have Latin American countries remained poor. Finally we will explore some of the feminist approaches in the Latin American tradition. (To download the syllabus for this course, which was taught in Spanish, click here). Normative Theories of Business: The main aim of the course is to help students clarify and refine their own understanding of, and perspective on, the role and nature of ethics within the business world. It will enable students to identify the most important argumentative strategies and guiding ethical principles that have been deployed to provide a foundation for the ethical responsibilities of businesses. Students will become acquainted with different ways in which corporations have been conceptualized, and will be able to bring out the main commitments underlying each of these. Ethical theories would be of little importance if they did not allow us to analyze actual ethical difficulties. Students will learn to apply these different theories to specific issues that pose ethical challenges. We will pay particular attention to the following: the ethical dilemmas posed by sweatshop labor and whistle blowing; the moral difficulties raised by outsourcing; and the tensions that arise for multinationals working in environments with varying laws, customs, and ethical standards.