Undergraduate Module Descriptor

PHL2118: Moral agency in social context

This module descriptor refers to the 2021/2 academic year.

Module Aims

The aim of this module is to encourage and enable you to reflect critically on ways in which people’s social conditions, including students’ own social conditions, might shape and constrain their moral knowledge and agency. The module draws on materials from the social sciences, such as the history of slavery and abolition, the sociology of inequality, and connects with analytical philosophical debates on collective moral responsibility, the social conditions of knowledge and ignorance, and the nature and extent of moral duties to needy others. In essence, you will learn to think about the ways in which society impacts on our individual capacity for moral agency.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

This module's assessment will evaluate your achievement of the ILOs listed here – you will see reference to these ILO numbers in the details of the assessment for this module.
On successfully completing the programme you will be able to:
Module-Specific Skills1. address philosophically the question of whether or how far people's moral beliefs and agency are determined or constrained by their social conditions of existence;
2. Demonstrate the ability to think about moral questions in a specifically social and institutional context.
Discipline-Specific Skills3. think, reason and argue analytically in social philosophy;
4. apply philosophical analysis to practical issues of historical and contemporary significance.
Personal and Key Skills5. deploy philosophical analysis in the assessment of everyday personal and social practices; and
6. demonstrate the ability to reflect on taken for granted assumptions.

Indicative Reading List

This reading list is indicative - i.e. it provides an idea of texts that may be useful to you on this module, but it is not considered to be a confirmed or compulsory reading list for this module.

T. Bender (ed.) (1992) The antislavery debate: capitalism and abolitionism as a problem in historical interpretation

G. Cohen (2000) If You’re an egalitarian, how come you’re so rich?

M. Moody-Adams (1997) Fieldwork in familiar places: morality, culture, and philosophy.

N. Pleasants (2008) ‘Institutional wrongdoing and moral perception’ Journal of Social Philosophy 39 (1), 96–115.

N. Pleasants ‘Moral argument is not enough: The persistence of slavery and the emergence of abolition’, Philosophical Topics, vol 38 (1), 2010, 139-60