Evangelian Collings

This was a course for 20 students offered through the department’s diversity initiative, which aims to attract students to philosophy via small introductory courses characterized by non-frontal teaching methods and readings from authors belonging to underrepresented groups.

Course Description: This introductory level undergraduate course examines various ethical problems arising in medicine. The first half of the course introduces two approaches to evaluating what is right and wrong, consequentialism and deontology, and applies them to issues including the distribution of healthcare resources, problems regarding harm vs benefit, and medical research. In the second half of the course, we study philosophical questions regarding the nature of life, death, and disability in order to discuss ethical issues surrounding euthanasia, abortion, and enhancement.

In many of our discussions throughout the semester, students will be invited to consider implications for reproductive ethics. Is it possible to harm someone by bringing them into (a worthwhile) existence? Why is there so little research on drug safety during pregnancy? What ethical issues are at stake in commercial surrogacy? Should parents be able to choose the characteristics of their future children? This course is strongly discussion-based, and students will have the opportunity to design their own final project

This was an evening course for 30 students, offered through the University of Pittsburgh College of General Studies.

Course Description: This is an introductory course in ethics, focusing on questions of right and wrong. We will begin with questions about what makes something good and what counts as a good life, before covering several theories of what makes an action right or wrong including consequentialist, sentimentalist, and deontological theories. These theories will be applied to moral problems of serious interest, including global inequality, animal rights, and procreative enhancement. Students will read both historical and contemporary texts, and participate in frequent class discussions.

This was a course for 20 students offered through the department’s diversity initiative, which aims to attract students to philosophy via small introductory courses characterized by non-frontal teaching methods and readings from authors belonging to underrepresented groups.

Course Description: This course seeks to understand the history behind ideas of race in Western societies as they emerged in the Early Modern period. In particular, we will ask how ideas concerning human difference were or were not supported by different theories about what it is to be a human being. This will center around philosophical accounts of human bodies, human minds, how the two interact, and how features can be inherited or common to populations. We will seek to understand the history behind influential ideas of race, and we will see how these ideas were opposed in their day as well as how we might respond to them ourselves.