Graduate Workers Need a Union

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Last night I attended a great panel hosted by the Graduate Employees of Northeastern University (GENU), a union of research and teaching assistants. The union is currently working towards holding its first election and becoming certified with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), an independent federal agency which protects employees’ rights to organize and oversees related laws.

Those of you immersed in academic life may have noticed a recent increase in organizing efforts among graduate workers at many institutions – this is due to a 2016 ruling by the NLRB that “student assistants working at private colleges and universities are statutory employees covered by the National Labor Relations Act.”

In other words, graduate employees have the right to organize.

Those not immersed in academic life, or less familiar with graduate education, might find this somewhat surprising. As someone said to me when I told them about this panel, “wait, you’re an employee? Aren’t you a student?”

Well, yes. I am an employee and a student. These two identities and lives are complexly intertwined and can be difficult to distinguish – when am I a worker and when am I a learner?

Often I am both simultaneously.

But I think about the perspective of the student program staff at the college where I worked for several years before starting my PhD. Collectively, we made a lot of student employment decisions – hiring student workers to help around the office and selecting paid student fellows to work at local organizations. Those students – primarily undergraduates – were workers, too, but every decision we made was centered around the question: how will this improve the student’s education?

That is, their student identity was always centered. Work expectations always deferred to course expectations. We looked to hire students who were prepared to learn a lot from their experiences, and we created structured mentorship and other activities to ensure student learning was properly supported and enhanced. The work was good work which needed to be done, but the primary purpose of these opportunities was always to create space for students to learn.

Graduate student work is…a bit more complicated. I have been fortunate in my own graduate experience, but I couldn’t even begin to enumerate the horror stories I’ve heard from other graduate employees whose work is most definitely work.

Even assuming good faculty members and good departments, the entire structure of American higher education is designed to exploit graduate students as cheap labor. Their labor may serve to enhance the undergraduate experience, but is rarely designed to enhance their own.

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that graduate student workers have virtually no power while the faculty, department, and administration they serve have a great deal of power over them. For graduate workers it is often not a possibility to simply “get another job” – a difficult undertaking for any vocation. International students are particularly vulnerable, as their Visa status could be taken away in a heartbeat.

As several of the panelists mentioned last night, many graduate students simply try to “keep their head down” in the face of this power imbalance. Stay quiet, don’t complain, and do your best to keep focused on the research you’re passionate about.

This is a reasonable copping response, but the reality is that silence never fixes a problem, and sometimes trouble will find you no matter how hard you try to avoid it.

Nearly all of the panelists had a story of someone who was unfairly targeted for termination, who was entirely taken by surprise when a department in which they “had no problems” suddenly had a serious problem with them.

Without a union these become the isolated stories of isolated individuals. They are personal problems to be worked out and ignored at the local level. In the absence of clear rules and expectations, they will happen again, and again, and again – in good departments and bad – with very little recourse for the individuals involved and with no resulting structural change to prevent it from happening again.

Unions build collective power. They build the ability of a people to come together, to share their ideas and concerns, and to work together with a common voice in order to achieve mutually-agreed upon outcomes.

As one of the panelists from a faculty union described, forming a union was a clarifying experience. It brought the community together and generated a clear, shared understanding of common problems and collective solutions. It created venues for enabling structural and policy changes that had been deeply needed for years.

Perhaps most fundamentally, it is important to understand that a union is not some abstract outside, thing. It is a living thing. It is the workers. It is a framework which allows us to work together, learn together, and build together. It is formed from our voices in order to address our concerns and to protect our interests.

We are the union.

And graduate student workers need a union.

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The live-stream of the event, which focused specifically on STEM workers, can be seen here. Particularly for those at Northeastern, please check the GENU-UAW website, Facebook page, and Twitter.

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Social and Algorithmic Bias

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A commonly lamented problem in machine learning is that algorithms are biased. This bias can come from different sources and be expressed in different ways, sometimes benignly and sometimes dramatically.

I don’t disagree that there is bias in these algorithms, but I’m inclined to argue that in some senses, this is a feature rather than a bug. That is: all methodical choices are biased, all data are biased, and all models are wrong, strictly speaking. The problem of bias in research is not new, and the current wave of despair is simply a reframing of this problem with automated approaches as the culprit.

To be clear, there are serious cases in which algorithmic biases have led to deeply problematic outcomes. For example, when a proprietary, black box algorithm regularly suggests stricter sentencing for black defendants and those suggestions are taken to be unbiased, informed wisdom – that is not something to be taken lightly.

But what I appreciate about the bias of algorithmic methods is the visibility of their bias; that is – it gives us a starting point for questioning, and hopefully addressing, the inherent social biases. Biases that we might otherwise be blind to, given our own personal embedding in the social context.

After all, strictly speaking, an algorithm isn’t biased; its human users are. Humans choose what information becomes recorded data and they choose which data to feed into an algorithm. Fundamentally, humans – both specific researchers and through the broader social context – chose what counts as information.

As urban planner Bent Flyvbjerg writes: Power is knowledge. Those with power not only hold the potential for censorship, but they play a critical role in determining what counts as knowledge. In his ethnographic work in rural appalachia, John Gaventa similarly argues that a society’s power dynamics become so deeply entrenched that the people embedded in that society no longer recognize these power dynamics at all. They take for granted a shared version of fact and reality which is far from the unbiased Truth we might hope for – rather it is a reality shaped by the role of power itself.

In some ways, algorithmic methods may exacerbate this problem – as algorithmic bias is applied to documents resulting from social bias – but a skepticism of automated approaches opens the door to deeper conversations about biases of all forms.

Ted Underwood argues that computational algorithms need to be fundamentally understood as tools of philosophical discourse, as “a way of reasoning.” These algorithms, even something as seemingly benign as rank-ordered search results – deeply shape what information is available and how it is perceived.

I’m inclined to agree with Underwood’s sentiment, but to expand his argument broadly to a diverse set of research methods. Good scientists question their own biases and they question the biases in their methods – whether those methods are computational or not. All methods have bias. All data are biased.

Automated methods, with their black-box aesthetic and hopefully well-documented Git pages,  may make it easier to do bad science, but for good scientists, they convincingly raise the specter of bias, implicit and explicit, in methods and data.

And those are concerns all researchers should be thinking about.

 

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no justice, no peace? (on the relationship between these concepts)

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As a political philosopher, I’m trained to think about justice versus injustice. Both terms are controversial. It would be hard to find two people (even two who might share the label be labeled “social justice warriors”) who define “justice” exactly alike. We each put together our own recipes using various combinations and flavors of liberty, equality, happiness, solidarity, sustainability, rights, voice, agency, status, security, and other values that conflict in practice. Injustice is equally complicated, and it may not mean the mere absence or negation of justice. But although the polarity of justice/injustice does not generate consensus, it structures many of our debates.

There’s another polarity that plays an analogous role for people who have been strongly influenced by Gandhi or the Civil Rights Movement: for instance, people who work in Peace and Conflict Studies.  This is the polarity of violence versus peace.

Again, both terms are complicated. Just as it won’t really work to define “justice” as equality (Equality of what? For whom? Equality and nothing else?), so it doesn’t work to define violence as physical assault, or peace as the absence of violence. Like justice, peace can provide the framework for a discussion in which various definitions are proposed and defended.

The following schematic diagram depicts these polarities as two different axes. It implies that it’s conceptually possible to have an unjust situation of peace or a just case of violence. Consider, for example, the imprisonment of a former dictator. He is arrested at gunpoint and forced into a cell (violence) but that’s a manifestation of justice. This case belongs in the bottom-left quadrant. On the other hand, situations of political quiescence involve living in injustice without any conflict: the top-right.

Some would argue that (true) justice is (true) peace; and injustice equals violence. Then the schematic is wrong; there is just one continuum whose ends should be labeled “Peace/Justice” and “Violence/Injustice.”

Or it could be that peace is a component of justice but not the only component. Perhaps you can’t have perfect justice with violence, but you can have a violent situation that’s more just than a peaceful situation would be, if the former scores higher on liberty, equality, or some other value.

My general instinct is to resist smooshing values together, because then we fool ourselves into ignoring tradeoffs. For instance, I don’t like to load lots of values into the definition of “democracy.” I prefer to define it as a system for making binding decisions in a group that affords everyone roughly equal influence. Then we can ask whether democracy requires or implies other values, such as social equality or freedom of speech, or whether it conflicts with these values. The same logic would encourage distinguishing between peace and justice as two different goods.

I have not made up my mind on this question, but here’s a text with which to think about it. Dr. King visited Joan Baez and other anti-war protesters in prison in Santa Rita, CA, on Jan. 14, 1968. Addressing a crowd outside the prison, he said (in my transcription from the audio):

There can be no justice without peace and there can be no peace without justice. People ask me from time to time, ‘Aren’t you getting out of your field? Aren’t you supposed to be working in civil rights?’ They go on to say, ‘The two issues are not to be mixed.’ And my own answer is that I have been working too long and too hard now against segregated public accommodations to end up at this stage of my life segregating my moral concerns. For I believe absolutely that justice is indivisible and injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And I want to make it very clear that I’m going to continue with all of my might, with all of my energy, and with all of my action to oppose that abominable, evil, unjust war in Vietnam.

The first sentence might mean that peace and justice are always causally connected: one is necessary for the other. But then it becomes clear that King’s struggle for Civil Rights is about “justice,” and his opposition to the war is about “peace,” and he wants to connect these two concerns because they are both “moral.” That implies that justice and peace are two distinct components of a larger category: what is moral or right. Finally, King defines the specific war in Vietnam as unjust, leaving open the possibility that a different war (e.g., the US Civil War?) might be just. In that case, peace in Vietnam is a necessity of justice but not because it will bring about peace; only because the war is an injustice.

At another level, of course, King insists on peace as a strategy for justice. Active nonviolence is an ethical and effective method in a wide range of circumstances, with a better record of success than violent insurrection has. But analytically, we could still distinguish between peaceful and just means and between peaceful and just ends and then ask when any of these four go together.

See also:  the kind of sacrifice required in nonviolence; social justice should not be a cliché; and we are for social justice, but what is it?

Using Thick and Thin Engagement to Improve Politics

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The NCDD network specializes in structures and processes for better civic engagement, which is why we wanted to share an insightful piece written by Matt Leighninger from Public Agenda, an NCDD member org. In the article, he gives concrete ways to improve politics from the ground up, by strengthening networks using both thin and thick ways of engagement. We encourage you to read Leighninger’s article below or find the original on Public Agenda’s blog here.

Fixing Politics by Strengthening Networks for Engagement

As David Brooks pointed out in his column on “How to Fix Politics,” our political system has reached a perilous state of dysfunction and distrust, and it is unlikely that any solutions to this crisis will come from the political parties or their presidential candidates.

Brooks is also right that the partisanship and incivility that plague our politics are not just due to poor manners or bad process skills. They are based in much deeper structural flaws in how leaders and communities engage each other around important issues and resulting strains in the relationship between citizens and government.

Brooks argues that strong community networks are essential for successful politics, and uses a 1981 quote from one of our founders, Daniel Yankelovich, to illustrate how long the weakening of those networks has been going on. “If we’re going to salvage our politics,” Brooks says, we’ll have to “nurture the thick local membership web that politics rests within.”

This kind of argument is often dismissed as a sentimental notion, or a lament over our lack of civic virtue, but it shouldn’t be. There are specific proposals and measures that can accomplish it.

Strengthening networks for engagement should be one of our top public priorities, and there are in fact a number of concrete ways to move forward on it. Much of our work at Public Agenda centers on these challenges, and we are part of a field of other organizations and leaders – from neighborhood organizers to innovative public officials – who have pioneered more productive formats and structures for democratic politics.

There are two kinds of communication that need to be happening for those networks to strengthen and grow. One kind, as Brooks references, is “thick” engagement that is intensive, informed and deliberative. In these kinds of settings, people are able to share their experiences, learn more about public problems, consider a range of solutions or policy options and decide how they want to act.

Other tactics produce “thin” engagement, which is faster, easier and potentially viral. It encompasses a range of activities that allow people to express their opinions, learn about other people’s views and affiliate themselves with a particular group or cause.

When thick and thin engagement activities are common and interwoven in community life, they can:

  • Facilitate faster, more far-reaching dissemination of information from governments, school systems and other public bodies.
  • Allow citizens to provide information back to the institutions, in ways that are convenient for people.
  • Foster discussion and connection, and the strengthening of personal relationships, among different groups of citizens, and among citizens, public officials and public employees.
  • Provide choices for people to make at the level of the family and neighborhood;
  • Create deliberative processes in which people can make informed public policy choices;
  • Encourage and support citizens to contribute their energy, ideas and volunteer time to improving their communities.

By understanding what thick and thin engagement look like, and what they can accomplish, communities can assess and improve their systems of engagement, or “civic infrastructure,” defined as “the laws, processes, institutions, and associations that support regular opportunities for people to connect with each other, solve problems, make decisions and celebrate community.”

Stronger civic infrastructure could include more productive and participatory public meetings, revitalized neighborhood and school associations, and vibrant local online forums. Overall, it should establish a better “ground floor of democracy” that fosters new leaders, creates social connections and helps people work together on common concerns like ensuring public safety and improving the quality of education for our young people.

The structural elements that support these activities can include:

  • new laws and ordinances on public engagement;
  • tools for engaging residents for neighborhoods and schools;
  • annual participatory budgeting processes;
  • public engagement commissions;
  • tools for measuring engagement and the strength of networks;
  • citizen advisory boards that engage rather than just trying to represent residents; and
  • protocols, job descriptions and professional development that help public employees understand how to support productive engagement.

While some of these elements are clearly the province of governments and school systems, many other components are ones that should be supported by neighborhood groups, nonprofits, businesses, faith communities, universities, foundations and other stakeholders.

David Brooks is right that strengthening the web of community networks can help fix politics, at every level of government. There are practical ways to do this – this is a matter for policy, law, cross-sector collaboration, and long-term planning. We should be proactive, and think constructively, about how we want our democracy to work.

You can find the original version of this article on Public Agenda’s blog at www.publicagenda.org/blogs/fixing-politics-by-strengthening-networks-for-engagement.

Bag of Words

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A common technique in natural language processing involves treating a text as a bag of words. That is, rather than restrict analysis to preserving the order in which words appear, these automated approaches begin by simply examining words and word frequencies. In this sense, the document is reduced from a well-ordered, structured object to a metaphorical bag of words from which order has been discarded.

Numerous studies have found the bag of words approach to be sufficient for most tasks, yet this finding is somewhat surprising – even shocking, as Grimmer and Stewart note – given the reduction of information represented by this act.

Other pre-processing steps for dimensionality reduction seem intuitively less dramatic. Removing stop words like “the” and “a” seems a reasonable way of focusing on core content words without getting bogged down in the details of grammar. Lemmatization, which assigns words to a base family also makes sense – assuming it’s done correctly. Most of the time, it doesn’t matter much whether I say “community” or “communities.”

But reducing a text – which presumably has been well-written and carefully follows the rules of it’s language’s grammar seems surprisingly profane. Do you lose so little when taking Shakespeare or Homer as a bag of words? Even the suggestion implies a disservice to the poetry of language. Word order is important.

Why, then, is a bag of words approach sufficient for so many tasks?

One possible explanation is that computers and humans process information differently. For a human reading or hearing a sentence, word order helps them predict what is to come next. It helps them process and make sense of what they are hearing as they are hearing it. To make sense of this complex input, human brains need this structure.

Computers may have other shortcomings, but they don’t feel the anxious need to understand input and context as it is received. Perhaps bag of words works because – while word order is crucial for the human brain – it provides unnecessary detail for the processing style of a machine.

I suspect there is truth in that explanation, but I find it unsatisfactory. It implies that poetry and beauty are relevant to the human mind alone – that these are artifacts of processing rather than inherent features of a text.

I prefer to take a different approach: the fact that bag of words models work actually emphasizes the flexibility and beauty of language. It highlights the deep meaning embedded in the words themselves and illustrates just how much we communicate when we communicate.

Linguistic philosophers often marvel that we can manage to communicate at all – the words we exchange may not mean the same thing to me as they do to you. In fact, they almost certainly do not.

In this sense, language is an architectural wonder; a true feat of achievement. We convey so much with subtle meanings of word choice, order, and grammatical flourishes. And somehow through the cacophony of this great symphony – which we all experience uniquely – we manage to schedule meetings, build relationships, and think critically together.

Much is lost in translating the linguistic signal between me and you. We miss each other’s context and reinterpret the subtle flavors of each word. We can hear a whole lecture without truly understanding, even if we try.

And that, I think, is why the bag of words approach works. Linguistic signals are rich, they are fiercely high-dimensional and full of more information than any person can process.

Do we lose something when we reduce dimensionality? When we discard word order and treat a text as a bag of words?

Of course.

But that isn’t an indication of the gaudiness of language; rather it is a tribute to it’s profound persistence.

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assessment criteria for participation in a seminar

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Thinking that I should be explicit about how I define good participation in a seminar that I’m teaching, I circulated these eight criteria:

  • Being responsive to other students. (Responsiveness needn’t always be immediate, verbal, or occur within the class discussion itself.)
  • Building on others’ contributions, and sometimes making links among different people’s contributions or between what they have said and the text.
  • Demonstrating genuine respect for the others, where respect does not require agreement. (In fact, sometimes respect requires explicit disagreement because you take the other person’s ideas seriously.)
  • Focusing on the topic and the texts, which does not preclude drawing unexpected connections beyond them.
  • Taking risks, trying out ideas that you don’t necessarily endorse, and asking questions that might be perceived as naive or uninformed.
  • Seeking truth or clarity or insight (instead of other objectives).
  • Exercising freedom of speech along with a degree of tact and concern for the other people.
  • Demonstrating responsibility for the other students’ learning in what you say (and occasionally by a decision not to speak).

Students also privately wrote how they will assess themselves. Their assessments will be for their reflection alone–I won’t ever see them.

See also: responsiveness as a virtue; what makes conversation go well (a network model); and network dynamics in conversation.

Opinion Change

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While there are differing views on whether or not a person’s opinions are likely to change, there’s a general sense of “opinion change” as some clear and discrete thing: one moment I think X, and the next moment I think Y…or perhaps, more conservatively, not X.

Coming to opinion change from a deliberation background, I’m not at all convinced that this is the right framework to be thinking in.

Perhaps in a debate the goal is to move your opponent from one discrete position to another, or to convincingly argue that your discrete position is better than another. But in deliberation – which very well may include aspects of debate – the very notion of “opinion change” seems misplaced.

I think of deliberation more as process of collaborative storytelling: you don’t know the ending a priori. You create the ending, collectively and uniquely. A different group would tell a different story.

As the story unfolds, you may shift your voice and alter your contributions, but the X -> Y model of “opinion change” doesn’t seem to fit at all. 

The challenge, perhaps, is that standard conceptions of opinion change take it as a zero-sum game. One person wins and another person loses. Or no one changes their mind and the whole conversation was a waste.

But deliberation isn’t like that. It is creative and generative. It is a collective endeavor through which ideas are born, not a competitive setting with winners and losers. In deliberation, all participants leave changed from the experience. They come to think about things in new ways and have the opportunity to look at an issue from a new perspective.

They may or may not leave with the same policy position they had going in, but either way, something subtle has changed. A change that may effect their future interactions and future judgements.

Standard conceptions of “opinion change” as a toggle switch are just too narrow to capture the rich, transformative interplay of deliberation.

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American Founders’ Month in Florida: Benjamin Franklin

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Sept 8 Franklin

Our celebration of American Founders’ Month here in Florida continues with a look at Benjamin Franklin. Mr. Franklin may be one of the most fascinating of the people who contributed to this country during the Founding Era. He was known for his wit, his charm, his brilliance, and yes, even his way with the ladies. He may be introduced to younger kids with the story of his decidedly unwise but ultimately legendary act of flying a kite in a thunderstorm, but truly, he was so much more than that. Take some time and check out this great DocsTeach resource on dear Mr. Franklin’s time as a politician and diplomat!

Grab the PowerPoint slide featured in this post: Ben Franklin AFM

And the wonderful musical 1776 is always worth checking out for some excellent historical debates and discussions. Here, Benjamin Franklin talks about what makes Americans different from their English cousins, featuring some of the wit and charm and especially intellect and passion he was known for  (relevant clip begins around :34).

 

Additional entries in the American Founders’ Month series:
Introduction to the Founding Fathers
Who Was George Washington?
Abigail Adams: Founding Mother and so much more


John Kasich is trying to hog the DREAMers, and that’s not fair

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I know it’s become standard fare for liberals to criticize Republicans for injustice. But I want to take a strong stand against this disgusting display, in which the Governor of Ohio, acting as a public official, told the world: “We want all the immigrants to come to Ohio, because we know how much they contribute to America!”

Notice that “all”? Kasich is edging for a monopoly. And that’s where I have to draw the line: this country was built on competitive federalism, and Ohio doesn’t have the right to all the DREAMers. Ohio should have to woo them the same as everybody else. Maryland has a right to DREAMers, too, and I’d argue we need them more.

Now I know many people will argue that Kasich is just engaging in salesmanship, a crucial part of the job as governor. He’s making a rhetorically strong pitch, not actually trying to use his office to allot an unfair advantage to his state. Maybe so. Donald Trump set off this absurd bidding war by changing the rules of the game in ending DACA. That was a dumb move, because now there’s a feeding frenzy as states compete to fill in the vacuum left by the federal government. Some states will win and some will lose. I think Congress should act to reset the playing field levelly, calm the market for the best and brightest citizens, workers, and entrepreneurs, by passing the DREAM Act.

Once they’re done, it’ll be time to deal with this gluttonous monster, Eli Bosnick:

Bosnick seems to think that his home state should get all the refugees, too. There are five million Syrian refugees fleeing the civil war there, and the United States already has far fewer of them than we deserve.

Bosnick exacerbates the problem by bogarting the Syrian refugees for himself. Steve Jobs was a Syrian immigrant, and Bosnick is saying, basically, “I want all the iPhones!” (Which, to be absolutely honest, just isn’t quite as good of a get since Jobs died.) But that’s not the American Way! Americans should be able to all have an opportunity to resettle Syrian refugees through their churches, synogogues, and mosques! Matthew La Corte and David Bier have argued just that, and we should listen.

(I’m sorry for the uncharacteristic satire, but I don’t know how else to express the intensity of my anger and outrage. We all feel some issues so deeply that we can’t engage in careful policy arguments about them; this is one of my weaknesses. I can tell you about the economic impact on growth, the effect on employment for native-born, the benefits to the home country through remittances, but it just seems silly to make this fight about numbers. Immigration makes me feel practically biblical:

When the alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien.  The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt:  I am the Lord your God. (Leviticus 19:33-34)

But here’s something sort of rational: I’ll be voting on this policy. So far, Kasich is the only potential candidate for 2020 who has come out this strongly: that means that right now, Republican or not, he has my vote. (If Kamala Harris can get the DREAM Act passed, though, I’ll definitely reconsider. And if we can get serious action on refugees from some public official of any party, I’ll be sold.)

my fall philosophy class on the question: How should I live?

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This introductory course will emphasize one of the great philosophical questions: “How should I live?” The readings will specifically consider whether truthfulness, happiness, and justice are important aspects of a good life, and how each should be defined. …

Moral Mapping Exercise: With colleagues, I have been developing a method for moral introspection that involves making and revising a network diagram (or map) of your moral ideas and the connections among them. I will ask you to make a private map early on and to revise it regularly. I will ask you to bring a copy to class that you are comfortable sharing: it should omit any ideas that you prefer to keep private. At the end, I will collect your final map and a 2-page reflection on it. Instructions are here.

Syllabus: Subject to Change

Sept. 6: Overview and introduction

I. Truthfulness

Is there an obligation to seek the truth? To say or teach the truth to others? How does truthfulness relate to happiness and justice? Can we know truths about ethics?

Sept. 11: Plato, Apology, sections §17-35. Also Justin P. McBrayer, “ Why Our Children Don’t Think There are Moral Facts ,” The New York Times, March 2, 2015. Or in this PDF if you have trouble reading it on the NY Times site.

Sept. 13: Plato, Apology §35-42. Also read the “introduction to moral mapping” section of this Google doc.

Before Sept. 18: Do the first two tasks of the moral network mapping exercise (1. “Generate a set of moral beliefs” and 2. “From a list to a network”). Bring a copy of your map that you are comfortable sharing with a partner during class.

Sept. 18: Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aphorisms §1-12

Sept. 20: Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aphorisms §13-32

Sept. 25: Bernard Williams, Truth, Politics, and Self-Deception, Social Research, Vol. 63, No. 3, (FALL 1996), pp. 603-617.

Sept 29, midnight. First paper due. Describe a situation in which it’s problematic whether to be truthful or not. Argue in favor of being truthful or not being truthful in this situation. Define what you mean by the term “truthful.” Give reasons for your position and explain and counter good reasons against it. Cite at least one relevant passage from Plato or Nietzsche.

I. Happiness

What is happiness? What are the best paths to happiness? Do we have a right to pursue our own happiness? Can we make others happy?

Sept. 27: Epicurus, “Letter to Menoeceus” (We will also discuss Socrates’ remarks about happiness in the “Apology,” already assigned.)

Oct 2: “Buddha” in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (You can also optionally consult “Buddha” from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)

Before Oct. 4. Do the third task of the moral network mapping exercise: “Investigate the shape of the network.” Make changes to the map if you have had any new ideas or changed your mind. Bring a copy to class to discuss.

Oct. 4: “Buddha” (continued)

Oct 9: No class (Columbus Day)

Oct. 11. Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

Oct. 11: More discussion of the “happiness” readings.

Oct 13. (midnight) Second paper due. Essay prompts (pick one):

  1. Many words seem related to the word “happiness”: for instance, “pleasure,” “satisfaction,” “equanimity,” “acceptance,” “joy.” Choose one such word and explain why it is a good goal and how one should pursue it.
  2. Socrates, Nietzsche, and Emerson recommend independence or self-reliance. Is this the best path to happiness? Why or why not?
  3. What is one belief about life or the world that would bring happiness if people accepted it as true? Is this belief true? Should people embrace it?

Regardless of which prompt you choose, summarize and respond to objections to your position.

III. Justice Toward Others

What are principles of justice? Which principles of justice are binding on whom? How do they relate to each other?

A. Welfare

We discussed happiness in the previous section. Could maximizing the happiness of all human beings–or something similar to that–be the main principle of justice?

Oct. 16: Mill, Utilitarianism, chapter 2 (“What Utilitarianism Is”) and chapter 5 (“On the Connection Between Justice and Utility”)

Oct. 18: Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Part I, chapter 1, §5 (versus utilitarianism)

Before Oct. 23: Do the fourth task of the moral network mapping exercise: “Consider the Location of the Nodes.” Make changes to the map if you have had new ideas. Bring a copy to class to discuss.

Oct. 23: More discussion of welfare.

B. Liberty

Oct 25: Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958), in Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (1969).

Oct 30: Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, Chapters 1, 4 and Postscript (pp. 11-21, 54-70, 397-411.)

Nov. 1: John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Part I, 1 §1-4, 2 §11-17, and 3 §24

Nov. 6: Discussion of Rawls continues.

Nov. 8: Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, pp. 149-177

Nov. 10 (midnight) paper due. Suggested essay prompt: Individual liberty and public happiness (or welfare) can conflict. Give a real or imaginary example of such a conflict, say whether you favor liberty or welfare/happiness in that case, and explain why, considering objections to your position. Cite at least one assigned author.

B. Equality

Nov. 13: [possible cancellation due to professor’s travel]

Nov. 15: Tim Scanlon, “When Does Equality Matter?”

Nov. 20: Bayard Rustin, “From Protest to Politics: Future of the Civil Rights Movement,” Commentary (February, 1965)

Nov. 22, midnight: Fourth paper due. Suggested topics: (1) Describe an example of an inequality that you consider unjust. Explain why some might reasonably consider it to be just. Argue that it is actually unjust and explain why. Cite at least one assigned text. (2) Give an example of an unequal situation that you consider justifiable. Explain why some might consider that situation to be unjust or unfair. Explain why it is actually just. Cite at least one assigned text. (3) What should we consider when we reason about what a just society is like? Is Rawls right that we should ignore our own situation and beliefs? Is Nozick right that we should pay attention to past actions that have created the current situation? What forms of information do you consider relevant to justice, and why?

D. Democracy

Nov. 27: Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and its Critics, pp. 106-52

Nov. 29: Kwasi Wiredu, “Democracy and Consensus in Traditional African Politics” (http://them.polylog.org/2/fwk-en.htm) and Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, “Democracy or Consensus?” ( http://them.polylog.org/2/fee-en.htm)

E. Identity

Dec 4: Audre Lorde, “ The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House ” and Steve Biko, “Black Consciousness and the Quest for True Humanity”

Dec. 6: Todd Gitlin, “The Left, Lost in the Politics of Identity,” Harper’s Magazine, 1993; and Susan Bickford, “Anti-Anti-Identity Politics: Feminism, Democracy, and the Complexities of Citizenship,” Hypatia Vol. 12, No. 4.

Before Dec. 11: Revise your moral network map again. Prepare a copy to hand in (omitting anything that you consider private and don’t want to share. Also write a note of up to 2 pages reflecting on the map.

Dec. 11: More discussion of the readings on democracy, diversity and inclusion.

Dec. 15: Fifth Paper due. Topic TBA.