A Democratic Philosophy 
Philip Pettit, Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of the University Center for Human Values

Democracy gives people control over their government on a collaborative and inclusive basis, via operational and selectional constraints, thereby reducing the government's dominating power. This set of seminars will focus on why the formula requires control, not participation, and why it gives control to people severally, not to the people as a body; it will explore the operational constraints, such as the rule of law, and the selectional constraints, such as electoral process, on which it seeks to build control; and it will investigate the point of democratic control.

A Democratic Philosophy is also a VPL Junior/Senior Seminar.

The Ethics of Love and Sex 
Liz Harman, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values

An examination of the moral principles governing love and sex. Questions to be addressed include: Do we ever owe it to someone to love him or her? Do we owe different things to those we love? Do we owe it to a loved one to believe better of him than our evidence warrants? What is consent, and why is it morally significant? Is sex between consenting adults always permissible, and if not, why not? Are there good reasons for prohibiting prostitution and pornography? Everyone has opinions about these matters. The aim of the course is to subject those opinions to scrutiny.

The Ethics of Love and Sex is also a VPL Junior/Senior Seminar.

Ethics & Public Policy
Chuck Beitz, Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Politics

The course examines major moral controversies in public life and competing conceptions of justice and the common good. It seeks to help students develop the skills required for thinking and writing about the ethical considerations that ought to shape public institutions, guide public authorities, and inform citizens' moral judgments in politics. We focus on issues that are particularly challenging for advanced, pluralist democracies such as the USA, including justice in war, terrorism and torture, market freedom and distributive justice, immigration, refugees, and criminal justice in conditions of social injustice.

Ethics & Public Policy is also a VPL Core Course.

European Intellectual History in the Twentieth Century
Ed Baring, Associate Professor of History and Human Values

In the twentieth century, Europe underwent a range of wrenching social and political upheavals that brought into question received truths about ethics, politics, the role of religion, the relationship between the sexes, and the place of Europe in the wider world. Over the course of the semester, we will study a range of different thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Luce Irigaray, and Jacques Derrida, examining how they responded to these upheavals and offered new ways to thinking about the world and how we should live in it.

Expressive Rights and Wrongs: Speech, Offense, and Commemoration 
Stephen Macedo, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and the University Center for Human Values

American law protects racist hate speech, pornography, and (much) lying. Other countries permit more restrictions on harmful speech, should we? Or will that undermine truth-seeking, political competition, and other values? Should speech be regulated instead by social norms, social media companies, and universities? Is "cancel culture" a problem? And what should we - as political communities and universities - honor and memorialize? How should we balance recognition of heritage and inclusion of people from diverse cultures and historically marginalized groups? Seminars will include debates. Active weekly participation required of all.

Expressive Rights and Wrongs is also a VPL Junior/Senior Seminar.

Environmental Film Studies: Research Film Studio
Erika Kiss, Director of UCHV Film Forum and Research Film Studio

The course examines environmental crises in relation to homemaking, starting with the definition of home as a place where energy is replenished. With the guidance of this theme and twelve masterpieces of cinema, we explore nomadic, settler, migrant, interstellar, and animal homemaking as well as homelessness while learning the theory and practice of film rhetoric.

Human Rights and Post-Conflict Justice
Richard Ashby Wilson, Professor of Anthropology 

This course brings an anthropological perspective to the law and politics of justice in post-conflict institutions, including the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, truth and reconciliation commissions, and the International Criminal Court. How do domestic and international institutions address the specific challenges of seeking accountability for human rights violations? It also evaluates international reparations programs, the gender aspects of international crimes, and the effectiveness of international courts in writing a history of mass crimes.

Introduction to Moral Philosophy
Sarah McGrath, Professor of Philosophy

Can questions about what is right or wrong have real answers independent of any sort of divine authority? Are there moral principles that any rational person must recognize, or is morality essentially an expression of our feelings or a product of our culture? Are we morally required to do our part in making the world as good as it can be, or does morality give us permission to pursue our own peculiar enthusiasms and interests? What should we do about deception, unwanted pregnancies, and world hunger? This course will provide an overview of these and other issues in moral philosophy.

Introduction to Moral Philosophy is also a VPL Core Course.

The Long Arc of Fascism
Shiri Pasternak, Canadian Studies Pathy Visiting Professor

Current debates over whether a given political leader or regime deserves to be described as "fascist" often pivot around the question: How much does this person or government closely mimic the genocidal far-right movements that took power in Europe in the 1920 - 30s? Such discussions assume mid-20th Century fascism to be a rupture or aberration in a fundamentally sound Western civilization built around the institutions of liberal democracy and capitalism. This seminar will disrupt these assumptions, exploring ways that political authoritarianism and genocidal practices have been intrinsic to, and inseparable from, capitalist modernity.

Media Literacy: What to Read and Believe in the Age of AI
Joe Stephens, Ferris Professor of Journalism in Residence

This seminar will explore how both personal values and public life are influenced by what we see, hear, and read in public media, both digital and on the printed page. Students will examine the challenges and opportunities that today's rapidly evolving media landscape present to freedom of the press, and to the democracy that the media serve. Discussion will focus on where facts about society come from & how citizens can best assess the credibility of individual news reports. Students will craft strategies for determining their own personal media diet and for bringing their values into the public conversation.

Normative Ethics: Longtermism 
Jacob Nebel, Professor of Philosophy

This seminar focuses on philosophical issues related to the moral significance of affecting the very far future. These include central topics on population ethics (the procreation asymmetry, nonidentity problem, and repugnant conclusion), decision theory (paradoxes of unbounded utility, probability discounting, risk aversion, and unawareness), and their intersection.

Philosophy, Religion, and Existential Commitments 
Lara Buchak, Professor of Philosophy

The choice of a kind of life involves both fundamental commitments and day-to-day decisions. This course is interested in zooming out and zooming in: how should we adopt commitments, and how do we realize them in ordinary life? What is the purpose of life, and how can you fulfill it? Should you live by an overall narrative, or is your life just the sum of what you actually do? Are commitments chosen or given to you? Are the decisions we think of as high stakes important at all? When should you relinquish what you thought were your deepest commitments? What should you do when commitments clash?

Values & Public Life Core Courses

Political Theory, Athens to Augustine
Melissa Lane, Class of 1943 Professor of Politics

A study of the fundamental questions of political theory as framed in the context of the institutions and writings of ancient Greek and Roman thinkers, from the classical period into late antiquity and the spread of Christianity in Rome. We will canvass the meaning of justice in Plato's "Republic", the definition of the citizen in Aristotle's "Politics", Cicero's reflections on the purpose of a commonwealth, and Augustine's challenge to those reflections and to the primacy of political life at all in light of divine purposes. Through these classic texts, we explore basic questions of constitutional ethics and politics.

Political Theory
Temi Ogunye, Assistant Professor of Politics

This course introduces students to political theory by having them think about political action. We will explore topics such as voting, illegal protest, revolution, social movements, boycotts, whistleblowing, and public shaming. In the process, we will examine some of the most important and enduring problems in political theory. Readings will be drawn from canonical theorists such as Weber, Hobbes, Marx, Mill, and Tocqueville, as well a wide range of contemporary authors.