PHIL 201a [winter 2019] -- Individual, Community, Common Good 1

This is the first quarter of a two-quarter (possibly three-quarter) graduate sequence in the history of social and political philosophy dealing with themes about individual, community, and the common good. The winter quarter will mostly focus on ancient and medieval figures and traditions, with some attention to philosophical developments bridging the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance (e.g. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and the Stoics, Augustine, Aquinas, Christine de Pizan, Francisco de Vitoria, Bartolomé de las Casas, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, and possibly Jean Bodin), whereas the spring quarter will focus on modern figures and traditions (e.g. Machiavelli, Hobbes, Cavendish, Locke, Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Wollstonecraft, Hegel, the Mills, and possibly Green and Bradley).

We are interested in a variety of moral and political questions about the status of individuals within communities: What do individuals owe other members of the community, and what does the community owe them? What kind of good is a community — a purely instrumental good, securing a modus vivendi, or a non-instrumental good? What are the bonds of community? Do they take various forms (natural, ethical, political, cultural, spiritual), and, if so, are any of these more fundamental or of higher value than others? How should communities be organized politically? What is the relationship between ethical and political and other social-cultural demands? Do any of these differ in ideal and non-ideal theory? How, if at all, are our conceptions of moral and political demands connected with our assumptions about human nature, about the ends of nature more broadly, and about the supernatural?
Many historical figures claim that ethical and political demands should be regulated by a common good. How is the common good to be understood, and what is the relationship between the personal or individual good and the common good? Are they essentially conflicting, complementary, mutually enabling, or even reciprocally entailing? Is the relationship between individual and community inherently antagonistic, or do political communities offer distinctive benefits or forms of self-realization to their members? In what way is the common good common, and what is the scope of the common good. Some conceptions of the common good are genuinely cosmopolitan, including every human (or rational) being and recognizing their equal moral standing. By contrast, other conceptions of the common good are parochial to various degrees and along various dimensions, recognizing an irreducible plurality of moral and political communities with diverse membership conditions and differential obligations toward insiders and outsiders, often based on differences in nature, culture, or relations to the divine.
One goal will be the exploration and assessment of different conceptions of community and the common good. In particular, we will be interested in assessing conceptions of partiality and the differing demands of virtue and justice in relation to men vs women, children vs adults, imperial (colonizing) vs indigenous (colonized) peoples, the ruling vs working (enslaved) classes, "civilized" vs “barbarians,” "faithful" vs “heathens,” etc. How should different genders, ages, races, ethnicities, and faiths relate to each other ethically and politically? How, if at all, are our conceptions of individual, community, and the common good — and especially the relations among them — affected by whether we see human nature and history as part of a providential (or otherwise human-transcending) design?


PHIL 201a -- Individual, Community, the Common Good pt II Spring 2019

Instructor: David Brink office: H&SS 801X hours: tbd email: dbrink [at] ucsd.edu	Instructor: Donald Rutherford office: H&SS 801X hours: tbd email: drutherford [at] ucsd.edu	Instructor: Clinton Tolley office: H&SS 8018 hours: tbd email: ctolley [at] ucsd.edu

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