Brady Seminars, 2009-2010

The Good One:  Seminar on Ethics and the Foundations of Democracy
Fall Quarter, Professor Robert Audi, Brady Distinguished Visiting Professor

This seminar is focused on moral questions central for understanding democracy and on the major moral standards that appropriately guide the ethics of citizenship.  Part One takes up major ethical theories and their connection to political thought, with discussion of Aristotelian virtue ethics, Kantian ethics utilitarianism, and common-sense pluralism as developed in the intuitionist tradition. Part Two concerns contemporary liberalism and the theory of constitutional democracy.  J. S. Mill’s On Liberty serves as background for this second part, and contemporary readings are drawn mainly from John Rawls, Political Liberalism (1993) and selected journal articles that take account of his views.  The course is designed to prepare students both for later work in the Brady Program on Ethics and Civic Life and for the public lectures (broadly on the seminar topic) to be given by the instructor in May of 2010.

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.