Racism – The Deviant Philosopher

Lesson: The Ethics of Racial Humor

by Luvell Anderson (Syracuse University)

The question—‘What makes humor racist, when it is?’—provides a rich platform for discussion about several philosophically interesting topics. The subject broaches issues in aesthetics, ethics, social and political philosophy, and even the philosophy of language. Challenges for constructing a theory of racist humor involve (1) distinguishing between humor and non-humor, (2) determining what racism is, (3) distinguishing the kinds of speech acts involved in humorous discourse and how they can give rise to racist utterances

Unit: Lynching, the Milgram Experiments, and the Question of Whether “Human Nature Is Good”

by Eric Schwitzgebel (University of California at Riverside)

This is a two-week unit. Day one is on the history of lynching in the United States, featuring lynching photography and Ida B. Wells. Day two is Mengzi on human nature (with Rousseau as secondary reading). Day three is Xunzi on human nature (with Hobbes as secondary reading). Days four and five are the Milgram video and John Doris on situationism.