Ethics is centrally concerned with questions regarding relations with oneself and with others and, more generally, our ways of life together. In this course we will examine competing accounts of the self’s relation to itself and to others from the history of philosophy. What sorts of relations to self and others do these accounts call for? We will concern ourselves especially with the various roles played by justice, pleasure, utility, and the good in these philosophical accounts. We will devote ourselves to close readings of texts by Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Philippa Foot, Charles Mills, Cora Diamond, Elizabeth Anscombe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others.
