ATS2869: Political Philosophy

Weekly tute papers: (300 words, 50 words) worth 5% each for a total of 30%. You submit 8, only your best 6 count, so if you wanna take a gamble you can technically skip two weeks. And I guess if you're perfect, you can safely skip at least one.

Major essay (2500 words): This was a very lax sort of assessment task. You pick one topic from six topics, but if you like, you have the option to come up with your own topic that you’re interested in and just write on that. If you submitted it before a certain date, you got it back with feedback and you’re given a week to edit it in view of the feedback, resubmit it, and get a new grade formed from the average of your two submissions. Worth 70% of your grade.

I gave the least helpful SETU evaluation for this unit. Something to the effect of “I have absolutely no complaints*** for this subject”. This is easily the best unit I’ve taken so far at Monash. It’s also the second subject run by Toby that I’ve taken, and I’m noticing some trends there. He cares a lot about pedagogy, and has a greater concern for the extent to which people learn the content than to the extent to which assessment tasks can be used to discern the good students from the great students. To this end, none of the assessment in this course was particularly challenging. Political Philosophy manages to be intellectually stimulating, while remaining juuust easy enough to keep you motivated throughout the semester. In the first week, the idea of weekly paper submissions sounded very demanding, but they were super short, marked extremely generously, and were a great way to keep you on your toes with the readings. In the 2nd year flavour at least, these papers were mostly expository, with the main criteria being your ability to express philosophical ideas with appropriate sophistication and language.

If it’s not clear enough from the unit description or guide (which, apparently, it wasn’t), this unit isn’t concerned with exploring the philosophical underpinnings of different political ideologies like conservatism or communism or authoritarianism. It seems some students were anticipating a type of hybrid polisci/philosophy unit. This isn’t the case, and while that sounds like an exciting subject, I think the actual content of this unit is far more interesting.

Pol Phil is mainly concerned with the question of how we ought to conceptualize “justice”. It was structured really well in this regard – we introduced some classical conceptions of liberal justice in week one, then got some quasi-economic tools to bring to contemporary perspectives on the matter. John Rawls (probably the main philosopher of the unit, like Peter Singer in ATS1371) comes in in week 3, then some feminist criticisms of Rawlsian justice, and then the idea of desert (pronounced like the culinary item, spelt like the arid geographic area, actually the noun form of deservingness) is introduced in opposition to Rawlsian egalitarianism. The unit then roughly shifts to a sort of desert V equality debate, which, in my opinion, is where the unit got really interesting. My essay was a defence of justice as desert, and I got a little obsessed, and haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Make my day, ask me about Rawls's metaphysical argument against desert.

I would definitely recommend this to any philosophy major, or, hell, anybody with a spare elective. Top unit.

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***If I have one complaint, though, it’s this: for no apparent reason, ATS2869 does not constitute a Human Rights elective. In 2015 and 2013, it is a HR elective. In 2014, for whatever reason, it’s not. The third year flavour is, but ATS2869 is a bioethics elective (despite only having one week, sort of just tacked on at the end, that gives any sort of biological context to justice). Like I said, if you’re taking this up post-2014, this doesn’t apply to you at all. But yeah, bit annoying.

John Thrasher & Toby Handfield

No exam

5 out of 5

Yes, with screen capture

Unit reader is essential.

1x1hr lecture, 1hr tute.

2014 Semester 2

TBA