As a matter of habit, we don’t usually think of right and wrong, moral terms, and ethical dilemmas as being historical. We often have to make up our minds about what’s good and bad in the moment, and sometimes it seems that moral and ethical matters are decided according to principles that are “outside” of history: permanent and unchanging. As a matter of fact, however, normative experience—morality, ethics, values, and principles—can be seen as profoundly historical. We are after all creatures of history who live in time, who can look at the past and imagine the future. Normative experience has a history that is worth understanding and explaining.

This course will examine some of the basic themes and debates of modern ethical life. Our perspective will be historical rather than philosophical, as we move from the Enlightenment to our contemporary period. We will begin by examining some of the basic intellectual resources for early modern ethical experience: the Bible, natural law, and new appreciations of the individual. We will then survey some of the central figures and controversies in the formulation of modern ethical cultures, balancing specific case studies—industrialization, imperialism, war, and genocide—with readings by influential thinkers such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, among others. We will focus on European sources with occasional reference to American texts. Our goal is twofold: to clarify some of the basic cultural dimensions of modern ethical life, and to understand more about the changing historical fortunes of ethical experience in the West since the eighteenth century.

Required Reading

• Emile Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, tr. Cornelia Brookfield
• Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost
• Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Mary Gregor, intro. Christine M. Korsgaard
• Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, tr. Raymond Rosenthal and Erroll McDonald
• John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray
• Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo, tr. Walter Kaufmann
• Jean Piaget, Moral Judgment of the Child, tr. Marjorie Gabain and William Damon

The Course Reader is available for purchase from the History Department main office.

Course Requirements

Grades will be assessed according to class participation and written work. Class attendance is mandatory.

You will write three papers. The first paper is a two-page reaction paper in which you respond to the readings of the first two weeks. You cannot possibly respond to all the readings in two pages, therefore you must choose which readings or interwoven themes you want to address.

The second paper is five pages in length. You will write a rough draft and a final draft. You should aim for your rough draft to be as polished as possible. Topics will be distributed ahead of time.

The final paper is ten pages in length. You will again write a rough draft and a final draft. You are responsible for choosing your own topic in consultation with me. We will present topics and bibliographies in class prior to the rough draft submission.

Paper #1 Due Thursday, September 12 (10% of final grade)
Paper #2 (rough draft) Due September 26 (15%)
Paper #2 (final draft) Due October 10 (10%)
Paper #3 (rough draft) Due November 26 (25%)
Paper #3 (final draft) Due December 10 (20%)

Attendance and participation (20%)

Course Schedule

August 29
Introduction

September 3 & 5
Deep Sources of Modern Ethical and Moral Life
Genesis 2:1-4:16, Exodus 3:1-4:31, 19:1-25:9, John 1:1-1:51
Pope Boniface VIII, Unum Sanctum (1302)
Machiavelli, The Prince (1513)
Montaigne, “Of Cannibals” (1580)
in the Course Reader

September 10 & 12
Bourgeois Morality I
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40)
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (1791)
Maria Ossowska, Bourgeois Morality (1956)
in the Course Reader

September 17 & 19
Contributions of the Enlightenment
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

September 24 & 26
Utilitarianism and Liberalism
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays (selections tba)

October 1
The Marxist Alternative
Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (1878)
Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (1985)
George G. Brenkert, Marx’s Ethics of Freedom (1983)
in the Course Reader

October 8 & 10
Origins of Postmodernism
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

October 15 & 17
Bourgeois Morality II
Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, vol. 1: Education of the Senses (1984)
Sigmund Freud, “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness” (1908)
in the Course Reader

October 22 & 24
The Sociology of Ethical and Moral Experience
Emile Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (selections tba)

October 29 & 31
Nationalism and Imperialism
Margaret Moore, “The Ethics of Nationalism” (2001)
in the Course Reader
Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (selections tba)

November 5 & 7
The Second World War and the Holocaust
Rab Bennett, Under the Shadow of the Swastika: The Moral Dilemmas of Resistance and Collaboration in Hitler’s Europe (1999)
in the Course Reader
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (selections tba)

November 12 & 14
Medical Ethics and Bioethics
Albert R. Jonsen, A Short History of Medical Ethics (2000)
in the Course Reader
(also, photocopied handout)

November 19 & 21
Psychology and Development
Jean Piaget, Moral Judgment of the Child (selections tba)

November 26
The Cold War
Herbert Marcuse, Soviet Marxism (1958)
Crane Brinton, A History of Western Morals (1959)
in the Course Reader

December 3 & 5
Since the 1960s: The Permissive Society versus Moral Rigorism
Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress” (1983)
——, “The Ethics of the Concern for the Self as a Practice of Freedom” (1984)
in the Course Reader