ATS2875: The Moral Psychology of Evil

Firstly, Justin is a great tutor and I loved tutorials for this unit. I would highly highly highly recommend doing whatever you can to get into his tutorials. He was missing for a few of our tutes, and whilst the replacements were still alright, they simply weren't as enjoyable or effective as Justin's. For this reason I would really do your best to get into Justin's tute. So... Once more... in case you missed it or think I'm joking. Do yourself a favour. Get into his tute. He's pretty jovial, has some really valuable thoughts on the subject (I think he's kinda one of the leading academic in the area? I know he made this unit a few years ago and there's not really too many similar units around in other unis, not that I've done extensive research, but he definitely jets off to all sorts of different countries to give conferences and things of that nature).

Lectures were good, but Justin's a better tutor than he is lecturer. (He's still a good lecturer, though), but often I was less engaged by the lectures than I was by the tutorials... I think he's just stylistically different to the 'deep philosophy' type that I'm used to - Bob Simpson, Toby, Linda etc... I'm used to people isolating one really specific conceptual issue and then breaking it into parts from different angles. Justin sort of told a type of narrative that involved the conceptual issue but it seemed harder to focus on for me, and so the lectures were just a bit harder to really focus on.

Content-wise, the unit material is in a large way concerned with the concept of "character" qua virtue ethics, so if you in some way reject out of hand that people have deep characters, you'd probably be in for a bad time. Some interest questions asked by the unit: are remote scenarios more indicative of someone's "authentic" character than their everyday actions? Are people less evil if they were merely 'unlucky' (shit childhood, bad situations qua Nazis)? Is someone more evil if they recognise it or have a role against it (doctors)? Can psychopaths be thought of as evil? In some ways, many of these questions rely upon certain empirical beliefs about human psychology, so took away from the 'conceptual meat' imo (which is probably represented in the missing 1.5 marks in my rating)... Because of the quasi empirical nature of the discussion and occasionally diluted conceptual idea - along with the somewhat, and merely somewhat, repetitive feel to the theme of 'evil' (well... let's face it... look at the unit name), the unit was at times less gripping than is ideal, but still good. I don't want to give a negative impression, because it really was a good unit, it just wasn't my favourite unit, but that doesn't make it bad.

Assessment was pretty standard. At the same time as this unit I was taking third year Political Philosophy which had a bit more meatiness to it, as well as another third year philosophy subject, so relative to those, this units assessment felt really easy to me (e.g., a 1000 word essay, whilst somewhat challenging, can't really be marked as harshly as a 2200 word essay).

The exam was 2 hours, 1500-2000 words in length. Sample exam was given prior to the exam with the old "the real exam will be very close to this exam" recommendation. To Justin's credit, the questions actually WEREN'T exactly the same, although they were quite similar. One question was outright completely different (as in, one was taken out, another completely new one put in). I'd only prepped for two questions, and one of the ones I prepped for was taken out, so that was a hilarious 10 minutes during reading time xD. So yep - be wary of that, but the exam is pretty easy given you prep well.

Sample exam available.

3.5 out of 5

The unit reader isn't HUGELY important. I skipped a LOT of readings for this unit just because I was under the pump... I mean, the first essay I got through by referencing one article in the reader and then referencing other journal articles etc, the second essay was a similar process - used a lot of external research on virtue ethics (SEP, Hurthouse, Annas). The exam was two short answer questions (choose from 8 or 10 or something), and I'd been a pretty lively member of tutorials so I had a good memory for the conceptual issues behind the questions. So, I got through the unit comfortably only doing three or so readings. That said, it was definitely a pain at times and my personal learning almost certainly suffered, but the unit is structured in a way that you won't be screwed if you don't do them. Obviously they'd be a really great thing to do, though.

TBA