Offered to: Class of 2020, 2021, and 2022
Prerequisites: None
Office Hours: By appointment
I will engage with interplaying sets of ideas falling under the broad head of ethics as it may come to play a role in the life of an Indian, more so an Indian policymaker. Students will grapple with issues surrounding morality and justice and locate these ideas in the relationship between the individual and the society, as manifested in developmental goals of contemporary policymaking. The idea will be to examine how to find out what may be the right thing to do, what are the limits of these findings, the role of policymaking in ascertaining social choices, and most importantly, what are the constituent morality the student herself is constituted of. This means, the course is an attempt to develop new forms of thinking, and exploring, rather than learning specific tools. The aim will be to raise questions and in that process expose the student to her own value judgments, with an invitation to consider if they need to change. In other words, we will be more interested in asking questions, rather than offering answers. Answers don't exist in the future, only approaches do. The world of uncertainty encourages us to explore a variety of approaches. And that readiness is the aim. If the course makes students anxious, that anxiety is the finding.
