Ethics and Public Policy: Contemporary Debates
This course will take up contemporary debates at the intersection of ethics and public policy. Of chief interest will be two areas of pressing concern: (1) the ethics of vaccination, where we will consider questions including whether vaccination (against, for example, COVID-19) should ever be mandatory and the ethical permissibility of various methods to improve vaccination coverage and (2) issues emerging from the so-called “Attention Economy.” Here we will take up questions surrounding the deliberate shaping of our attention by state and commercial actors, including (among others) whether the commodification of attention is ethically permissible.
We will address these topics through an examination of some of the philosophical literature on, among other things, liberty, political liberalism, collective action, so-called nudging, manipulation, and commodification.
This course will take up contemporary debates at the intersection of ethics and public policy. Of chief interest will be two areas of pressing concern: (1) the ethics of vaccination, where we will consider questions including whether vaccination (against, for example, COVID-19) should ever be mandatory and the ethical permissibility of various methods to improve vaccination coverage and (2) issues emerging from the so-called “Attention Economy.” Here we will take up questions surrounding the deliberate shaping of our attention by state and commercial actors, including (among others) whether the commodification of attention is ethically permissible.
We will address these topics through an examination of some of the philosophical literature on, among other things, liberty, political liberalism, collective action, so-called nudging, manipulation, and commodification.
- Moderator/in: Inken Bachmann
- Moderator/in: Katharine Naomi Whitfield Browne
- Moderator/in: Hendrik Schween
Semester: 2021/22 Wintersemester