Ethics
“Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God's name is the point of philosophy? What is the point of the study of objectivism if there is no response to the question of what you say to someone who wants to know if they should take a drug and if that means they'll die two days later or a few months earlier? At that point, I think anybody who is into philosophy seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we've been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you don't feel that as one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook.”
The above philosophical re-envisioning of Stuart Hall’s damning critique of cultural studies holds true, urgently so, for philosophical studies. What is the point of learning about theories of ethics if, in the end, we have no practical, human answer to the question of “(how) should we live”? This module begins with this question, and this urgency. We examine both influential and subversive answers to this question, and develop and challenge our own. Running through the module, we question the ethics of philosophical education itself.