Alex Sarappo

Non-human animals are, whether directly or indirectly, an important part of human lives, and human beings are an important part of animals¿ lives. Human beings are always preoccupied with moral questions, and such questions have been recently finally brought to bear, with intense focus, on the lives of non-human animals and how human beings ought to relate to them. This course addresses some of these questions: (1) Do animals have moral standing? If yes, what does this mean and what is this moral standing? (For example, do they have rights or is it their sentience that matters?) (2) May we consume animals or their products? If no, why not? If yes, under what conditions? (3) Under what conditions may we experiment on animals? (4) What is it about animals¿ nature, as opposed to plants¿, that leads some to claim that it is wrong to kill or use them but not wrong to kill or use plants? (5) May we hunt animals in the wild? May we interfere in their lives to help lessen their difficult lives? (6) What are some debates surrounding the ethics of zoos and aquariums? Finally, (7) what are morally acceptable and unacceptable political activism on behalf of animals? Students will gain an understanding of important issues and theories in animal ethics; critically evaluate their own moral convictions; and learn to construct arguments and explain philosophical ideas. Among others, authors we read are Carol Adams, Carl Cohen, David DeGrazia, Rosalind Hursthouse, Alastair Norcross, Mark Rowlands, Tom Regan, Peter Singer, Roger Scruton, and Nick Zangwill. Assignments vary, but they might include some or many of the following: weekly reading responses, quizzes, papers, and exams.

Questions about how to live are central to the study of ethics. Similar questions are central to literature. Are works of literature, then, works of ethics? Our interrogation of this question will cover a varied terrain. We will start with a classic text in philosophical ethics, John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, paying close attention to argumentation and the way its arguments are designed to convince, before considering those same features in responses to that text from both Bernard Williams (a philosopher) and Ursela LeGuin (a fiction writer). We'll then think about Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn--what have philosophers, like Jonathan Bennett, made of its central moral dilemma? How about fiction writers, like Percival Everett? We will then turn to J.M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals, a novel with a sophisticated and much-debated moral issue at its heart, our treatment of nonhuman animals. Finally, we'll conclude with a study of the philosophy and novels of Iris Murdoch: what can her first novel, Under the Net, help us understand about her philosophy, in papers like 'The Idea of Perfection,' and what can, generally, a writer working within and between ethics and literature help us understand about what keeps the two disciplines apart, and what brings them together?