A copy of my "'Good' on Twin Earth" can be found HERE and a copy of my reply to Jaegwon Kim's and Ernest Sosa's comments on that paper can be found HERE.

On the Grand Scale of Graduate Courses (which ranges from 'general survey' at one end to 'narrowly focused research seminar' on the other) Contemporary Moral Theory will lean heavily towards the general survey end.  The central objective of the course is to give participants a working acquaintance with a reasonable chunk of the most important work that has been done in moral theory during the twentieth century.  Our aim will be to cover those works in contemporary moral theory that every graduate student in philosophy should have read before leaving graduate school.  Those who plan to work in moral theory will of course need to read a great deal more; but after the course is over everyone in it should feel comfortable in all but the most specialized of discussions.

Concepts, catch-phrases, technical terms, etc. with  which you should be completely familiar with by the end of the course can be found HERE.

Schedule: The class will meet at 3:30 pm on every other Thursday, beginning with the second Thursday of the quarter -- except when we come to the end, when there will be meetings in consecutive weeks.  So it will be meeting on April 12th, April 26th, May 10th, May 24th, May 31st.  Following a model that worked last year, the seminar will meet from 3:30 until sometime around 6 pm, and then we'll go somewhere for dinner -- where the conversation will continue.  The cost of the dinners will be covered, thanks to the very generous support of an anonomous donor.

Readings: these will be selected from a huge number of papers collected together in 20th Century Ethical Theory [click on the title for the collection's table of context] edited by Steven Cahn and Joram Haber, which should be available in the bookstore (although the collection is not cheap, using it ended up being less expensive than collecting together in a course pack just the papers we would use from it).  There is as well a list of readings to supplement the Cahn and Haber [click on what is underlined for the list].  Also, we will be reading selections from John Rawls' A Theory of Justice and Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (if you don't own those books, we'll work out a way to make the relevant selections available).

First Assignment: We will start with G. E. Moore's "The Subject-Matter of Ethics" from Principia Ethica, W.D. Ross' "What Makes Right Acts Right?" from The Right and the Good, A. J. Ayer's "A Critique of Ethics" from Language, Truth, and Logic, and C. L. Stevenson's "The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms."

Written Work: In preparation for each seminar meeting -- so every other week -- participants will be asked to write and send me (via email) a short paper (1-2 pages) on some issue, topic, or argument related to the readings for the up-coming meeting. For the end of the seminar, participants will be asked either to hand in a seminar paper or to take an exam covering the course material.  Please send the papers as email attachments, writing "Irvine seminar" in the subject field.  I would prefer to have the papers in WORD, single spaced, 12 point Times Roman font, with 1 inch margins.

20th Century Ethical Theory, A Theory of Justice, and Anarchy, State, and Utopia are all available from Amazon.com. (I believe that if you order these book (or anything else) using the link on this page a small referral fee will eventually be paid to the UNC Philosophy Department.)