The Free and Just Society

An introductory course in social-political philosophy

Course Overview

Everyone wants to live in a free and just society. Yet there is substantial disagreement about what a free and just society looks like. In this course, we will investigate these and other core political concepts with the aim of understanding them in their complexity as well as coming to more justified beliefs about what they mean and require. While our focus will be philosophical, we will regularly bring out theorizing to bear on political questions: We will investigate the fundamental nature of political freedom while seeking to answer whether COVID-19 lockdown policies were a violation of freedom.

This course is designed around the Interpret, Elaborate, Evaluate framework for philosophical investigation. Our time will be spent working to interpret and understand the ideas of others, elaborating on those ideas by extending the reasoning and applying them to real world situations, and then evaluating the ideas and arguments to determine how well justified they are. In the process, you will be working to develop your own understanding of the core concepts and questions of political philosophy.

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