Institutions and Practical Reason

We live our lives in a thicket of institutions: small-scale, such as friendships and marriages, large-scale, such as massive economic and political systems, and everything in between. These institutions yield standards by which individual conduct in pertinent contexts can be assessed; these standards can themselves be ethically evaluated. Individuals must organize their commitments to these standards and evaluations in some kind of ethically responsible way. These issues have been discussed on rather different terms in normative ethics, political theory, normative theory, action theory, and social metaphysics. Our goal will be to bring these different literatures to bear on a general inquiry into the ethics of institutional participation. Topics may include: recent work on reasoning; rule worship; exclusionary and silencing reasons; the putative distinctness of political normativity; incentives and the 'ethos of justice'; the ethics of exchange; social structures and practices; and institutionalised relational values. Limited to graduate students in Philosophy and to others by permission of the instructor. 2 unit option available only to PhD students beyond the second year.