Last Minute Course Prep Exchange
The fall term has begun at several schools and is about to begin at others, and for at least some professors that means putting the finishing touches on syllabi. Need readings suggested on Subject S? Need a piece which argues for Position P? Need a complement to Canonical Character C? Need a you get the idea and didn’t really require all of those Examples E? Fine. Put your requests to other readers, and chime in with your answers.
I’d love it if anyone could point to some clear, accessible papers in bioethics on topics other than abortion, euthanasia, the non-identity problem, and informed consent. Non-super-famous non-white-male authorship is also good. Thanks to anyone kind enough to respond.
Here’s an article that might be interesting to discuss:
http://bioethics.northwestern.edu/atrium/articles/issue12/peace.html
Savulescu’s paper on “procreative beneficence” is clear, accessible, and interesting to students. So is this response to it:
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/5374637_The_Fallacy_of_the_Principle_of_Procreative_Beneficence
Norman Daniels is a good starting point for a discussion of access to health care.
http://philpapers.org/rec/DANHNA
The Velleman-Haslanger debate on anonymous gamete donation is great.
http://philpapers.org/rec/VELFH
http://www.mit.edu/~shaslang/papers/HaslangerFASm.pdf
Good luck!
I’ve liked doing a lot on resource allocation (ties in with the ACA, ties in with contemporary political philosophy, ties in with lots of other stuff). Kamm’s work is excellent (but hard for students). I’ve used her “Is it Morally Permissible to Discontinue Nonfutile Use of a Scarce Resource” as an easier piece than some of her more famous stuff, and many students really liked it.
Students also seem to like exchanges on some of the issues that Daniels has worked on recently. They really liked Rebecca Kukla’s “Medicalization, Normal Function, and the Definition of Health,” which challenges the Daniels/Boorse view and its use by Daniels in allocation questions.
Some like Gopal Sreenivasan’s objections to Daniels’s equality of opportunity argument.
More generally, Sreenivasan’s “Why Justice Requires Rationing Health Care,” which I’ve used as one of the early papers when I’ve taught healthcare and justice because I can point to it and say “write clearly — like this.”
If you anticipate lots of pre-meds, then Buchanan’s “Is there a Medical Professional in the House?” has been good. He argues that medical professionals’ prestige/income may not be justified, and pre-meds tend to find it provoking.
I’ve published some articles that may be useful to you. These articles use philosophy of disability/disability theory to examine arguments on various topics in the area of bioethics and are suitable for an upper-level undergraduate bioethics course. My article “Biopower, Styles of Reasoning, and What’s Still Missing from the Stem Cell Debates”(Hypatia 2010) uses Foucault, Hacking, me, and others to examine bioethical (including feminist bioethical) arguments for and against embryonic stem cell research, as well as how impairment is constituted by and through this technology and the discourses surrounding it; my article “Reproductive Freedom, Self-Regulation, and the Government of Impairment In Utero” (Hypatia 2006) uses Foucault, Hacking, me, and others to examine disability and genetic counseling discourses that surround prenatal testing and screening, as well as how impairment is constituted through these discourses and technologies; my article “The Biopolitics of Bioethics and Disability,” which is the introduction to a special issue of J of Bioethical Inquiry (2008) on disability and bioethics that I guest edited, uses Foucault Amundson, and others to lay out an argument about the political character of the field of bioethics. It’s a terrific issue of the journal and there are other articles, on various issues, included in it that you may wish to consider for your course. In any case, you can read my articles on my academia.edu page here: https://independent.academia.edu/ShelleyTremain
@1: have you considered the recent published articles concerning the behavior of physicians with sedated patients? It’s not the usual stuff and given the range of opinions in comment sections, could provide interesting conversations touching on a number of topics
1) Suggestions for readings on the ethics of markets? Specifically, I’m looking for something that gives an opposing view to Sandel’s work.
2) Suggestions for short readings that give an overview of contemporary liberalism, conservatism, and libertarianism?
3) Suggestions for readings opposing drug legalization (other than Wilson, which is dated)?
I believe Vida Panitch has written something about 1), if I remember correctly: http://carleton.ca/philosophy/people/vida-panitch/
Re 1: I’m not sure if commodification arguments are what you are interested in, but Debra Satz’s book and Elizabeth Anderson’s Value in Ethics and Economics jump to mind. I’ve never taught either.
Re 2: I’ve found Skorupski’s chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Liberalism helpful — though I haven’t taught it. When I’ve taught these sorts of issues. I’ve given them “classic” readings (selections from Rawls (I like the one in Sterba’s anthology), Anderson’s “What is the Point of Equality,” and selections from Nozick (I’ve had success with the selections from Machan’s The Libertarian Reader and Vallentyne and Steiner’s Left-Liberatarianism and its Critics), then I’ve just lectured through anything more recent that I wanted to work on.
3) Peter de Marneffe has an essay opposing drug legalization in Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics (2nd ed.) edited by Cohen and Wellman.
On the ethics of markets question, you might look at some of Jason Brennan’s work, perhaps in particular his book _Markets without Limits_. (He also had a paper in Ethics recently on similar topics.) I have not read this stuff, so can’t comment on it directly, but given what I know of Brennan’s views and works, I don’t doubt that it stakes out an interesting position in a provocative way. (Also, someone below mentioned Satz’s book. It argues for a position somewhat similar, in terms of results [but not arguments] to Sandel’s, so doesn’t work if you want something arguing for an opposing view. I have taught both her book and Sandel’s. I think hers is clearly better philosophically, though harder to teach to students without much background in philosophy or lots of world experience.) Another option, less philosophical but still fun for it’s coldness and literalness, is the classic piece “The Economics of the Baby Shortage” by Elizabeth Landes and Richard Posner. It’s a bit dated in some ways, though.
I’m sure there are good writings out there, but I’m not finding them:
I’m teaching an applied ethics course, and I want to do a segment on underrepresentation in certain lines of work (stem in this case, but the idea is generic). I can find plenty of things on “what causes group X to be underrepresented and what can we do about it” — but I’m not finding good, accessible writing on why underrepresentation in (STEM, but anything really) employment is bad (or not, I suppose!!).
This is a somewhat trivial request, but does anyone know of a good, humorous clip that would provide a caricature of philosophy, perhaps along the lines of what students would be expecting of an introductory philosophy course, something of a foil for a better portrayal of philosophy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDK9rhWBUlg
This is exactly what we do to make money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVQrpok9KPA&feature=youtu.be
I know a lot of colleagues like to use this — though it may not be precisely what you might be looking for.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNkjDuSVXiE
I am interested in feminist authors addressing race and gender issues in hip hop music (lyrics, sampling, production, copywrite and other legal issues, music videos, etc.). I am looking for suggestions to expand the short list I already have. Would be quite happy for suggestions of all sorts.
Does anyone know of any good science fiction stories (preferably in the public domain) that touch on: 1) causation / counterfactuals, 2) personal identity, 3) David Lew’s modal realism (as opposed to *branching* time, about which there are many stories). This is for a second-year metaphysics course I’m taking
I once read “Learning to be me” by Greg Egan in a course as a supporting material on personal identity. I guess that Joe Haldeman’s “More Than the Sum of His Parts” might also be useful for that topic.
Eric Schwitzgebel’s blog The Splintered Mind is a treasure chest for ideas about philosophical science fiction. He has done multiple posts on science fiction. But see here: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/PhilosophicalSF.htm
That’s a fantastic resource! Thanks Shelley – and Eric and his many contributors.