Teaching

I regularly teach two core courses required for the Public Policy Leadership major:

PPL 212: Critical Thinking, Communication, and Public Policy
PPL 300: Public Policy and Ethics

I also teach two upper-level electives:

PPL 370: Philosophy of Leadership
PPL 492: Punishment Policy

You can find course descriptions for each course below, in order from highest to lowest course number. While my course syllabi almost always change in minor ways each semester, the most recent version of the syllabus for each class is also available for download.

PPL 492: Philosophy of Punishment Policy

In the United States, legal punishment takes various forms, but primarily consists of incarceration or fines. Yet what justifies the state in putting people in prison or taking their money? Put another way, why do we punish people? Understanding the proper purpose of punishment can help us conform our methods of punishment accordingly. For instance, if the purpose of punishment is to rehabilitate offenders, we will need to ensure that whatever methods of punishment we use actually rehabilitate. Similarly, if the purpose is to deter others from committing crimes, we must verify that our punishments accomplish that goal. In this way, understanding why we punish informs how we should punish. Once we begin investigating the justification of punishment, however, we may discover that there simply isn’t any, and we shouldn’t punish anyone at all. In this course, we’ll explore why we punish, how we punish, and how things ought to change so that these questions are in sync.

Download Syllabus (Spring 2022)

PPL 370: Philosophy of Leadership

We all think we know leadership when we see it: the charismatic prime minister reassuring her citizens during a national crisis and laying out a recovery plan, the brave general inspiring his troops forward into battle, the ruthless CEO showing investors how she increased profits. But what makes all of these instances of leadership? Is leadership more than just the heroic leader commanding others that we’re so familiar with in the US? If this is all leadership is, it would be rare indeed. Few of us could ever expect to be leaders. But how important is leadership anyway? After all, recently there have been so-called leaderless social movements, like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, so perhaps we don’t need leadership. Or do these movements simply have leadership in a different form? It may be that we don’t always know leadership when we see it, depending on what leadership really is. So it’s worthwhile to explore the nature of leadership so that we can recognize it and appreciate the opportunities we have for leadership in its various forms.

But we don’t just want to be leaders; we want to be good leaders. Once we understand leadership better, we can ask what good leadership looks like. Is good leadership just being effective, and doing whatever gets results for those one is leading? Or does it require being ethical as well? After all, sometimes being an effective leader seems to require doing things that might be considered unethical, like lying, or even worse. When, if ever, is a good leader justified in getting her hands dirty in these ways?

Throughout the course, we’ll focus on these two key questions: (1) What is leadership? (2) What is good leadership? As we explore these questions, we’ll encounter others, such as who can be a leader and whether democratic leadership is contradictory. As a PPL course, we’ll focus mainly on political leadership, but students are encouraged to draw comparisons with other types of leadership as well.

Download Syllabus (Spring 2021)

PPL 300: Public Policy and Ethics

In a democracy, reasonable citizens may disagree about what is right and wrong, and consequently about what policies should be in place. One way to try to adjudicate these disputes and determine whether policies are ethical is by appealing to various moral considerations (e.g. consequences, rights, duties, etc.), highlighted by competing moral theories. In this course, we will explore several of these moral considerations and their corresponding moral theories, with an eye toward how to determine whether some policy is ethical and thus resolving moral disputes about public policy issues. In the first part of the course, we will explore theoretical moral foundations, pausing with each to see how they can be applied to some policy issue. In the second part of the course, we will dive into a few timely public policy issues in more depth. By exploring some of these controversial policy topics, we can see (1) how moral theories underlie the disagreements, (2) how to effectively argue for good public policy, and (3) how to create public policies that are ethical and that respect the diversity of our American democracy.

Download Syllabus (Spring 2022)

PPL 212: Critical Thinking, Communication, and Public Policy

We all spend a significant amount of time thinking about issues and policies that are important to us. Few of us, however, spend time thinking about how to think about those things. If we do not think critically and rationally about policy issues, we may not be creating or supporting the best policies for ourselves or for society, nor can we effectively argue for those policies. Yet the best arguments will fail if they are not communicated well. And in a society that seems increasingly polarized and uncivil, even the best arguments can go unappreciated. So, in addition to helping students improve their skills in thinking critically, this course is designed to help students improve their skills in reading, writing, and communicating civilly through written work, individual presentations, and debates.

Students will learn the nature of arguments, the nature of deductive and inductive reasoning, common reasoning errors and how to avoid them, and some keys of good communication and public speaking. Students will also learn to apply their critical thinking skills in analyzing, criticizing, and strengthening arguments pertaining to contemporary issues in public policy.

Download Syllabus (Fall 2021)

PHIL 328: Biomedical Ethics

In January of 2020, I taught an honors section of Biomedical Ethics with StudyUSA. During the first part of the course, students learned the basics of biomedical ethics. Then we traveled to Washington, D.C. to meet with policymakers, lobbyists, researchers, and more to discuss how bioethics bears on a variety of contemporary issues, including:

Phyllis Arthur, Vice President for Infectious Diseases and Diagnostics Policy at BIO (The Biotechnology Innovation Organization)
Ronald Bailey, science correspondent for Reason magazine
Dr. Teresa Blankmeyer Burke, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Gallaudet University
Dr. Kate Blizinsky, Policy Director for the All of Us program
Dr. Evan DeRenzo, Assistant Director of the John Lynch Center for Ethics at MedStar Washington Hospital Center
Grace Graham, Health Policy Director, the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions
Jill Hamaker, Vice President of Federal Government Affairs at Emergent BioSolutions
Kahlia Kéita, Clinical Ethics Educator at the John Lynch Center for Ethics at MedStar Washington Hospital Center
Klon Kitchen, Senior Research Fellow of Technology at The Heritage Foundation
Senator Trent Lott
Dr. Maximilian Muenke, CEO of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics
Taunton Paine, Program Director of Clinical Research at the National Institutes of Health
Amy Pellegrino, Health Policy Director, the US Senate Special Committee on Aging
Dr. Khara Ramos, Director of the Neuroethics Program at the National Institutes of Health
Dr. Meredith Weaver, American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics
Senator Roger Wicker