Last (fall) semester I did something new: I taught a first-year seminar course for the honors program. The first year seminars allow the professor to build a course around an issue of her choice, within a few broad areas. I created a new course half on animal cognition and capacities and half on animal ethics, called “Animal Minds and Human Obligations.” I believe the course went very well and ended up being one of the two or three favorite classes I’ve had in my decade of teaching at CMU. Happily, I have been invited back by the honors program to teach it again in the fall.
This semester didn’t go quite so well for me to begin with. The special topics class on Environmental Ethics, intended to be the pilot for the possible future addition of Environmental Ethics to the books as a regular course, was cancelled for under-enrollment, a problem that has hit several upper-level philosophy classes over the last few years. I hope that I will be able to give it another try next year. Instead I was moved into a section of Moral Problems. I have tailored the Moral Problems class to be as much about environmental ethics as I can get away with; the theme this term will be “Human Beings and Nature” and we will be covering animal ethics, environmental ethics, and genetic engineering.
The rest of my load this term is made up of three sections of Business Ethics, which I’m always happy to teach, though three times in a day does get to be a bit much, I confess!