Brady Seminar descriptions, 2008-2009

The Good One:  Self-Understanding and Self-Deceit in the Moral Life
Fall Quarter, Professor Samuel Fleischacker, Brady Distinguished Visiting Professor

We will spend a semester attempting to understand and take seriously Adam Smith's claim that self-deceit is "the source of half the disorders of human life."  We'll look at classic studies of self-deceit in modern moral philosophy, along with a series of treatments of the phenomenon in historical and fictional writings - this will enable us to consider the possibility that the psychological detail into which a novelist or historian can go may be more helpful to us, in coming to recognize our own tendencies toward self-deceit, than any philosophical theory.  We will also consider self-deceit in our own lives:  students will, for instance, write introspective pieces on ways in which they may be deceiving themselves, and will also read descriptions of each other's ideals critically, challenging each other with the possibility that elements of these descriptions reflect self-deceit.

The Good Neighbor: Self and Other in the Actual World
Winter Quarter, Professor Laurie Zoloth

At the heart of the problem of how to live a good life is the relationship between the self and the other. For moral philosophers as distinctive as Emmanuel Levinas, Aristotle, or Stanley Hauerwas, ethics is “the first philosophy” and the defining act of leadership is the decency and grace of relationships between oneself and one’s neighbor, friend, family and the strangers who come to us in need. In this seminar we will ask: How one should act in relationship to the other? To find answers, we will explore primary texts in the humanities about relationships, duties and correlative rights between friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors. What do we owe one another? How do promises bind us? The winter-quarter seminar will trace the nature, goal and meaning of these relationships and widen the range of questions from the fall seminar’s concern with the individual moral agency of leaders. For the writers of our texts, a close examination of relationships will allow us to discern responses to the question: what is the good act and what makes it so? These daily ethical encounters make the larger goals of leaders for a good society or a good state very concrete. Often, we judge leadership to be lacking if leaders are personally callous, insincere or inconstant friends, or betrayers of promises and duties in families. The theories of statecraft that you will encounter later in the spring seminar are crafted and made tangible in this quotidian and concrete manner, one relationship at a time. It is the contention of the winter seminar that the interruption of the specific and actual person into our lives, and our response to her need and her call is one of the core challenges and puzzles of a good human life.

The Good Place: Rethinking democracy after globalization
Spring Quarter, Professor Christina Lafont

This seminar will focus on the conditions necessary to realize the democratic ideal of a society of free and equal citizens. In the first part of the seminar, we will analyze different models of democracy to see how they propose to organize social and political institutions in order to achieve the democratic ideal. Although these models make quite different proposals, all of them assume a relatively closed society of a single nation-state. However, under the current conditions of globalization brought about by the end of the Cold War, it has become apparent that the democratic ideal cannot be achieved by individual societies or nations in isolation. Thus the main political challenge of the 21st Century is to figure out whether necessary conditions for democracy, such as citizens' political participation, public deliberation, etc. can be reproduced at the global level. Can citizens have a say on political decisions that affect them even if they are reached beyond the domestic borders of their own society? Is it possible to design a new international order in which the democratic ideal does not get totally diluted? In the second part of the seminar, we will analyze this difficult set of questions by discussing some interesting recent proposals for a new international order with a focus on how they handle issues of international human rights standards, global poverty, the new economic order, etc.