Advanced Topics

Learners are encouraged to select one or two tracks aligned with their interests rather than attempting to complete all tracks.

Advanced Metaethics and Moral Epistemology

This track investigates whether moral values are objective features of reality, how moral terms function linguistically, and how humans can possess justified moral knowledge in the face of evolutionary debunking challenges.

Robust Realism and Non-Naturalism: Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism (David Enoch, Oxford University Press) - Defends non-naturalist moral realism by demonstrating the indispensability of irreducibly normative truths to deliberative practical reasoning.

Expressivism and Moral Semantics: Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning (Simon Blackburn, Oxford University Press) - Develops quasi-realist expressivism to explain how projectivist moral claims earn the right to truth-evaluable propositional grammar without asserting objective facts.

Moral Error Theory and Fictionalism: The Myth of Morality (Richard Joyce, Cambridge University Press) - Defends metaethical error theory and revolutionary fictionalism by arguing that the objective prescriptive authority presupposed by moral discourse is a biological illusion.

Evolutionary Debunking and Moral Intuitionism: Ethical Intuitionism (Michael Huemer, Palgrave Macmillan) - Defends rationalist intuitionism and phenomenal conservatism against moral skepticism, subjectivism, and evolutionary debunking objections.

Moral Psychology, Agency, and Responsibility

This track examines the psychological mechanics of moral action, the relationship between moral evaluation and motivation, the nature of intention, and the criteria under which agents can be held morally responsible.

Moral Motivation and Practical Reasons: The Moral Problem (Michael Smith, Wiley-Blackwell) - Systematically analyzes the central trilemma between moral cognitivism, motivational internalism, and the Humean belief-desire theory of action.

Agency, Volition, and Weakness of Will: Moral Psychology (Richard Holton, MIT OpenCourseWare 24.120) - A complete university course examining akrasia, intention, free will, addiction, and how empirical psychology challenges traditional models of human agency.

Reactive Attitudes and Moral Responsibility: Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (John Martin Fischer & Mark Ravizza, Cambridge University Press) - Articulates a semicompatibilist theory of moral responsibility grounded in reasons-responsive guidance control rather than alternate possibilities.

Practical Reason and Intentional Action: Intention (G. E. M. Anscombe, Harvard University Press) - Foundational text in philosophical action theory analyzing intentional action under description and practical knowledge without observation.

Empirical Ethics and Situationism: Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (John M. Doris, Cambridge University Press) - Uses experimental social psychology to mount an influential situationist critique against the robust character traits presupposed by Aristotelian virtue ethics.

Applied, Biomedical, and Technology Ethics

This track applies ethical principles to high-stakes practical domains, examining healthcare decision-making, the moral status of potential people, the badness of death, climate harms, and the moral status of artificial agents.

Biomedical Ethics and Clinical Principles: Introduction to Bioethics (Georgetown University / edX) - Comprehensive university course exploring bedside ethics, informed consent, clinical autonomy, reproductive technologies, and healthcare allocation.

Biomedical Ethics and Clinical Principles: Principles of Biomedical Ethics (Tom L. Beauchamp & James F. Childress, Oxford University Press) - The standard treatise establishing the four-principles framework of autonomy, nonmaleficence, beneficence, and justice across modern health professions.

Population Ethics and Future Generations: Reasons and Persons (Derek Parfit, Oxford University Press) - Foundational monograph establishing modern population ethics, formulating the non-identity problem, the Repugnant Conclusion, and impersonal moral theory.

The Philosophy of Death and Moral Status: Death (Shelly Kagan, Open Yale Courses PHIL 176) - Complete open video lecture series investigating personal identity, the deprivation account of death's badness, Lucretian symmetry, and the moral permissibility of suicide.

Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: Ethics of AI (University of Helsinki / MOOC.fi) - Applied open course addressing value alignment, algorithmic bias, accountability in autonomous systems, and the socio-technical governance of automated decisions.

Climate Ethics and Intergenerational Harm: Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World (John Broome, W. W. Norton) - Analyzes the moral duties of private individuals and states regarding carbon emissions, discount rates for future lives, and intergenerational justice.

Political Philosophy, Rights, and Distributive Justice

This track investigates the moral legitimacy of coercive state institutions, the justification of property rights, international moral obligations across borders, and the conditions governing justifiable defensive harm.

Distributive Justice and Entitlements: Justice (Lucas Stanczyk, MIT OpenCourseWare 24.04J / 17.01J) - Structured course lecture notes and recitations evaluating classical utilitarianism, Nozickian libertarian entitlements, and Rawlsian egalitarian liberalism.

Distributive Justice and Entitlements: Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Robert Nozick, Basic Books) - The definitive libertarian defense of individual rights as side-constraints, the minimal state, and the historical entitlement theory of justice.

Global Justice and Human Rights: World Poverty and Human Rights (Thomas Pogge, Polity Press) - Argues that affluent societies violate negative moral duties by imposing an unjust global institutional order that foreseeably causes severe global deprivation.

Democratic Legitimacy and Epistemic Authority: Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework (David M. Estlund, Princeton University Press) - Formulates epistemic proceduralism, demonstrating how democratic legitimacy depends on a decision procedure's tendency to produce morally correct outcomes.

Rights Theory and the Ethics of War: Killing in War (Jeff McMahan, Oxford University Press) - Overhauls classical just war theory by rejecting the moral equality of combatants and grounding liability to defensive harm in individual moral responsibility.

Critical, Relational, and Comparative Ethics

This track explores normative frameworks that critique individualistic, abstract Western paradigms by centering caring relationships, social situatedness, epistemic power dynamics, and non-Western philosophical traditions.

Feminist Care Ethics: The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (Virginia Held, Oxford University Press) - Develops care ethics into an autonomous normative theory centered on relational dependency, emotional attunement, and non-contractual social obligations.

Epistemic Injustice and Moral Knowledge: Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Miranda Fricker, Oxford University Press) - Identifies testimonial and hermeneutical injustice as distinct moral wrongs occurring when prejudice deflates credibility or impairs collective interpretive resources.

Classical Chinese Moral Philosophy: Humanity and Nature in Chinese Thought (Chad Hansen, University of Hong Kong / edX) - Advanced open course examining classical Chinese ethics, contrasting the Confucian relational Dao with Mohist utilitarianism and Daoist naturalism.

Buddhist Ethics and Moral Psychology: Buddhism and Modern Psychology (Robert Wright, Princeton University / Coursera) - Comprehensive audit-mode course examining Buddhist moral philosophy, the illusion of the modular self, and cognitive mechanisms of craving and compassion.

African Relational Ethics: A Relational Moral Theory: African Ethics in and Beyond the Continent (Thaddeus Metz, Oxford University Press) - Formulates a comprehensive analytic moral theory based on African Ubuntu traditions, defining moral rightness through communion, harmony, and mutual aid.