POLIS 2106 - Justice, Virtue and the Good

The aim of this course is to teach you about political theory, and its function and place within the discipline of political science. We do this by reading, analysing and criticising the arguments made by some of the great political theorists in the Western tradition and by exploring some of the most controversial debates in political theory. The theorists we read and study include: Socrates, Plato, the Stoics, the Epicureans, John Locke, Adam Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Will Kymlicka, Peter Singer and Susan Moller-Okin. We also look at controversial debates including the ethics of abortion, pornography and cultural rights, whether it is acceptable to compel people to vote and whether or not we have moral obligations to strangers. The emphasis in this course in on argument. We look at the arguments raised by each of these theorists and the evidence they use in support of the claims they make. We also learn how political theory can resolve some of the tensions and ambiguities around real life issues.