Philosophy 104

This course will be a survey of arguably the greatest works of moral philosophy in the Western tradition—Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, and Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics—followed by some of the most influential writings of the past century. Interwoven throughout these works, so strikingly different in their methods and conclusions, are attempts to answer the following questions:

1. How should we live? Which goals or activities are the most important? Why? What makes them so?
2. Which actions or traits of character are morally obligatory or virtuous? Why? What makes them so?
3. Why, if at all, should we care about being moral? How are the answers to 2 related to the answers to 1?
4. What must we be like in order to be morally obligated, or capable of moral virtue? (After all, pebbles and insects don’t have moral obligations. In what way are we relevantly different?) In particular, must we have “free will”?
5. How, if at all, can questions like 1–4 have objectively correct answers?