Articles by Andrew Sabl

I’ve written some fairly extensive comments on the podcast that Paul Gowder posted a few weeks ago (or, more precisely, on the written paper (.pdf)).  Since they’re several pages long, I’ve decided to link to them as a .pdf rather than taking up oodles of space in a web post. I do think the paper is very exciting, and I hope that these comments will spur further discussion either here or below Paul’s original post.

Anyway: here are the comments.

Hi all,

I just joined Public Reason (having met Simon at a conference) and am looking forward to participating.  I’ve already seen lots of terrific material, and realize that I should have joined long ago.

I have what may seem a strange problem.  I’ll be teaching an undergraduate lecture course in Political Ethics next Spring quarter, as I have in the past.  This is a conceptual rather than a practical course, it covers not bribes and whistleblowing, but the basic theoretical works relevant to political ethics issues (though we will treat a few actual cases).  We’ll be reading Pitkin on representation, Machiavelli’s Prince, Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation”–and a bit of moral philosophy on an introductory level: utilitarianism, deontology, Bernard Williams on integrity and personal projects and shooting one to save ten, that sort of thing.  While the course is nominally upper level, there are no prerequisites (UCLA’s bureaucracy won’t allow it), and UCLA has no core requirements in moral and political philosophy such that I can count on students’ knowing some.   Nor is this a course for philosophy (or political theory) majors.  The students are political science or public policy majors interested in the substantive issues, not in ethical theory.

My problem is Kant.  When I’ve taught the course in the past, I’ve tried teaching Kant through the Grounding and a few of the writings on lying, but it hasn’t worked out.  The students find my lectures clear; they like Korsgaard on the right to lie; they get the murderer at the door stuff and enjoy debating it–but the Grounding is just over their head.  Spending two weeks on it (out of ten) doesn’t help: that’s of course not enough time, and it’s not the right students, and they’re just not able to take it in.  But I don’t really know how else to teach Kantianism.  “Theory and Practice” is lovely but deceptively allusive and not on the main topics of deontology; the same is true in spades of “Towards Perpetual Peace.”

I’d welcome any suggestions: an unknown piece of Kant (e.g. a public lecture) that I’m not familiar with?  (If it’s in German only and not too long, fine: I’ll happily translate for the class and with luck for publication in Teaching Ethics or something.)  A standard introductory piece on Kantianism, with a few key quotations and some down-to-earth yet serious explication?

In this I may be handicapped by never having taken an introductory ethics course myself.  I took a whole course on the First Critique and read lots of Kant’s (and others’) ethical works in advanced-undergraduate and graduate seminars, but never had to learn as an undergraduate what I’m now supposed to convey.  (The famous Justice class at Harvard doesn’t count: I’m looking to convey a bit more than is expected in that entertaining but not egregiously substantive course.)

To some extent, Mill’s Utilitarianism, while nowhere as baffling as Kant, is also hard to teach in such a context, and I’d welcome suggestions for substitutes or supplements to that too.

Many thanks in advance,

Andy.