Last semester I took a seminar with Renée Jorgensen on moral rights and social norms. One of the main questions we discussed throughout the seminar is how a special kind of moral ignorance about non-moral facts (what R. Jorgensen calls “normative opacity” in her book manuscript) influences how people act in a setting where some norms are in place, and what guidelines we establish for determining if a mistake is “reasonable.” Our ignorance about whether someone consented to have sex with us or whether we have the right to exercise self-defense leaves us both prone to mistakes that can call for compensation and in need of norm-driven guidance that helps us distribute the costs of our actions fairly. As such, we appealed to tools ranging from moral notions of blame and responsibility and legal tools in tort law to game-theoretic notions of cooperation.
Despite how fascinating these questions turned out to be, I must admit that it took me a while to appreciate them, and that one faculty member advising me on what courses to take was the one who made me stop being stubborn and go outside of my comfort zone. “You must take an ethics course while you’re in Michigan! It might even connect with your interests in science and values, science, technology, and society, and so on.” So, as I said on the first day of the seminar, the course was not related to my research, but I only took it to broaden my theoretical horizons. That made it sound laudable, an exercise in intellectual curiosity, but, truthfully, I waited patiently to see if I could have an “aha!” moment to start rambling about science or any other topic that was more in my wheelhouse. Since my undergraduate education in philosophy was primarily historical and not thematic/problem-based, I was worried about my first-ever ethics and political philosophy class. Unsurprisingly, I initially made the course much more difficult for myself than I should have, and was grasping at straws with some of my written assignments, and I felt unprepared and inadequate to participate compared to my colleagues working on ethics or social and political philosophy. It didn’t help that some of my misunderstandings were about the professor’s view!
Why, then, reflect on this course? The short answer is that I was thinking about it completely the wrong way, and I can think of many things I learned that I’m confident will contribute to my doing philosophy further down the line (more on this below). For the long answer, I can think of at least three reasons. First, the professor was as quick to identify my shortcomings in her class as she was eager to help me improve my class performance in ways that suited my interests and needs. This is a good place to describe the written assignments that we had: we had to write a couple of “curiosity briefs” that were a quick way to detect a question, suggest a hunch of an answer, and scan the relevant literature; a couple of longer, medium length abstracts (in the type of conference submissions); and either a longer final paper or doubling the two previous kinds of assignments to create an “idea seed bank.” The thought of a final paper for such a class didn’t sound like a good idea since I’m not planning on researching rights and norms, so we decided the seed bank, a big set of mini assignments, would be the best alternative for me. That leads me to my second reason: forcing myself to come up with different topics for what ended up being twelve written pieces helped me engage a lot more with the course material than I would have otherwise, as well as focusing on one small question at a time. Even if the whole course and the group of experts seemed too daunting, surely I could ingest the material one small bite at a time! Thanks to a couple of conversations with the professor and some friends in the seminar, I could finally put the curiosity in “curiosity briefs” and start to think of and reap the professionalization benefits of writing conference abstracts. Learning the course content ended up being subordinated by and a byproduct of rethinking how I approached my assignments, which is one of the things I greatly appreciate about this course. And third, this pedagogical twist did eventually help me get into a healthier mindset and connect the course content with my antecedent interests! I ended up writing on how, for instance, we could adapt Aristotelian phronêsis to accounts of the actions of reasonable agents in negligence law and on how much the moral responsibilities of scientists in democratic societies could depend on which norms they have to follow—those of their community, of society writ large, and so on.
I could keep talking about how the course strengthened my interests in virtue ethics or the sociopolitical dimensions of scientific practice, but I think my biggest takeaways are about the skills I should keep honing, like writing multiple versions of the same idea in different lengths and depths and making more precise which threads of a question to pull, and about how I should approach my own teaching. Last semester was also my first-time teaching since before the pandemic (and the first one as a discussion section leader). From what I have been mentioning, it is ironic in retrospect that I was teaching an Intro to Ethics class and that Renée herself was in charge of observing one of my classes and helping me become a better instructor for my students. While I’m sure I’ll get better at doing this the more I teach, our conversation after my observation and how my own learning was addressed in her class, among others, have allowed me to see that I should strive to “meet the students where they are,” which means that even if they all have different starting places with the skills of reading, writing, and discussing philosophy, my role is to help them hone them, independently of how well-developed they are, to the best of my ability.
Francisco Calderón
Francisco Calderón is a second-year PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Michigan. He is mainly interested in the philosophy of physics (mostly quantum field theory), early Greek philosophy and science, and neighboring fields in history, philosophy, and sociology of science.
