Form #3A – Course Outline
Instructions for completing Form #3A are in Section II.A.4 in the EPC Manual
ARNOLD, MARYLAND
Course Information:
Course Name:
Contemporary Moral Problems
Course Number:
PHL 146
Credit Hours:
3
Initiator:
Carolin Woolson
School:
Arts and Sciences
Department:
Philosophy
Date:
9/24/08
Catalog Description:
PHL 146
Contemporary Moral Problems
3 credit hours – Three hours weekly; one term.
Examine some of the currently debated ethical and social issues in our culture such as reproductive rights, sexual
violence, death penalty, affirmative action and censorship. Reflect critically on the ways in which factors such as
race, gender, ethnicity, class, disability and sexuality operate in our culture and how those factors consequently both
shape and are shaped by the terms on which these issues are (or are not) debated.
Prerequisite: Eligibility for ENG 111.
Division Of Subject Matter:
Lecture
Hours
Main Topics
1.0
2.0
3.0
4.0
5.0
6.0
7.0
8.0
Recognizing and Understanding Difference
Sexual Violence
Abortion and Reproductive Rights
Death Penalty
Affirmative Action
Censorship
Same Sex Marriage
Testing
Total
Lab
Hours
11
6
8
4
4
6
3
3
45
Detailed Course Outline
Main Topic
1.0
Recognizing and Understanding Difference
1.1
Introduction: Ethical reasoning and differing perspectives
1.1.1
Film: The Lottery
Lecture
Hours
11
Lab
Hours
2.0
3.0
4.0
5.0
6.0
7.0
8.0
1.2
Gender and oppression
1.3 African American experiences
1.3.1
Exclusion, marginalization and silencing
1.4 Internalized oppression
1.4.1
Otherness and shame
1.5
Disability
1.5.1
The invisible minority
1.5 Class and powerlessness
1.6.1
The myth of meritocracy
1.7
Globalization and poverty
1.7.1
Power and the global economy
1.8
Whiteness and privilege
1.8.1
On the invisibility of whiteness as a racial category
Sexual Violence
2.1
Rape and the law
2.2
Rape and male survivors
2.3
Rape and male socialization processes
Abortion and Reproductive Rights
3.1
Abortion
3.1.1
The “Future Like Ours” argument
3.1.2
Feminist analyses and arguments
3.1.3
Abortion and disability
3.2
Reproductive technologies
3.2.1
Artificial insemination and in-vitro fertilization
3.3
Race and reproductive freedom
Death Penalty
4.1
Race, class and the death penalty
4.2
The retribution defense
4.3
On the ethics of arbitrary distribution
Affirmative Action
5.1
Historical survey
5.2
Gender and Affirmative Action
5.3
Class, race and Affirmative Action
Censorship
6.1
Hate speech
6.1.1
Hate speech and the Harm Principle
6.1.2
Hate speech and the First Amendment
6.2
Pornography
6.2.1
Libertarian arguments
6.2.2
Feminist arguments
Same Sex Marriage
7.1
Conservative arguments
7.2
Feminist perspectives on the law, family and marriage
Testing
Textbooks
Title
Contemporary
Moral Issues
in a Diverse
Society
6
8
4
4
6
3
3
Author
Publisher
Yr of Publication
ISBN
Julie M.
MacDonald
Wadsworth
1998
978-0534513214
References (Optional)
Gender
“Pricks and Chicks.” Robert Baker
Femininity and Domination. Sandra Lee Bartky
Feminist Ethics. Claudia Card
The Reproduction of Mothering. Nancy Chodorow
Men and Masculinity. Theodore Cohen
For Her Own Good. Barbara Ehrenreich
The Politics of Reality. Marilyn Frye
In a Different Voice. Carol Gilligan
The Politics of Women’s Biology. Ruth Hubbard
The Gender Knot. Allen Johnson
Sex, Art and American Culture. Camille Paglia
What Makes a Man. Rebecca Walker (ed.)
The Beauty Myth. Naomi Wolf
Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy and Policy. I. M. Young
Gender/Race
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Gloria Anzaldua
Black Feminist Thought. Patricia Hill Collins
Women, Class and Race. Angela Davis
Ain’t I a Woman? bell hooks
Privilege, Power and Difference. Allan Johnson
“Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” Chandra Mohanty
Inessential Woman. Elizabeth Spelman
Race
“On Becoming an Arab” Leila Ahmed
The Sacred Hoop. Allen, Paula Gunn
Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. Derrick Bell
Silent Covenant: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial
Reform. Derrick Bell
Soul on Ice. Eldridge Cleaver
Black Skin, White Masks. Frantz Fanon
The Mismeasure of Man. Stephen J. Gould
Orientalism. Edward Said
How Race is Made: Slavery, Segregation and the Senses. Mark M. Smith
Race Matters. Cornel West
“The Death of the Profane”. Williams
Class and Globalization
Bastard out of Carolina. Dorothy Allison
For Crying Out Loud: Women and Poverty in the United States. Diane Dujon
The Other America. Michael Harrington
Mountains beyond Mountains. Tracy Kidder
“Globalization, Tourism and the International Sex Trade”. Beverly Mullings
Ending Poverty as we Know it. William P. Quigley
Nickel and Dimed. Barbara Ehrenreich
Disability
Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability, Oppression and Empowerment. James
Charleton
Disability Studies Reader. Ed. Lennard J. Davis
Extraordinary Bodies. Rosemarie Garland Thompson
Waist-high in the World. Nancy Mairs
Sexual Violence
Rape on the Public Agenda: Feminism and the Politics of Sexual Assault Maria Bevacqua
Tranforming a Rape Culture. Emilie Buchwald
Against Our Will. Susan Brownmiller
The Epidemic of Rape and Child Sexual Abuse in the United States. Diana Russell
I Never Called it Rape. Robin Warshaw
Abortion and Reproductive Rights
The Ethics of Reproductive Technology. Kenneth D. Alpern
What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said: The Nation’s Top Legal Experts Rewrite America’s Most Controversial
Decision. Jack Balkin
The Abortion Myth. Leslie Cannold.
“Outcast Mothers and Surrogates: Racism and Reproductive Politics in the Nineties”
Angela Davis
“Abortion: On Public and Private” in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State.
Catherine MacKinnon
The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life. Jeff McMahan.
Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement. Jennifer Nelson
Making Women Pay. Rachel Roth
Beyond Choice: Reproductive Freedom in the 21st Century. Alexander Sanger
Woman and the New Race. Margaret Sanger
Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization and Abortion in Public Health and
Welfare. Johanna Schoen
Abortion and Social Responsibility: Depolarizing the Debate. Laurie Schrage.
Death Penalty
No Equal Justice. David Cole
Hidden Victims: The Effects of the Death Penalty on the Families of the Accused. Susan
Debating the Death Penalty: Should America have Capital Punishment? The Experts
On Both Sides Make their Best Case. Ed. Hugo Bedau and Paul Cassell.
The Death of Innocents. Sister Helen Prejean
A Life and Death Decision: A Jury Weighs the Death Penalty. Scott Sundby
Arbitrary and Capricious. Michael Foley
The Death Penalty For and Against. Louis Pojman and Jeffrey Reiman
Affirmative Action
Affirmative Action is Dead: Long Live A A. Faye Crosby
Affirmative Action. Lynne Eisaguirre
The Ups and Downs of Affirmative Action Preferences.
Ali Raza et.al.
Understanding Affirmative Action: Politics, Discrimination and the Search for Justice.
Kellough
In Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action. Terry H. Anderson
Affirmative Action and Racial Preference: A Debate. Carl Cohen and James Sterba
Censorship
Pornography: Men Possessing Women. Andrea Dworkin
Letters from a War Zone. Andrea Dworkin
Porn 101. Ed. James Elias, Veronica Diehl Elias et. al.
“Pornography: On Morality and Politics” in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State
Catherine MacKinnon
On Liberty. John Stuart Mill
Sharp
Edward
The Language Police. Diane Ravitch
Same Sex Marriage
“Marriage, Law and Gender: A Feminist Inquiry”, Nan Hunter
Beyond Straight and Gay Marriage: Valuing all Families Under the Law. Nancy Polikoff