Master
2025/2026
Political Ethics
Type:
Compulsory course (Politics. Economics. Philosophy)
Delivered by:
School of Politics and Governance
Where:
Faculty of Social Sciences
When:
2 year, 1, 2 module
Open to:
students of one campus
Instructors:
Boris Kapustin
Language:
English
Contact hours:
32
Course Syllabus
Abstract
This course introduces students to political philosophy with a special focus on issues of morality inasmuch as they arise in the realm of politics. Topics will include discussions of the difference between "moralism" and "realism", of the role of violence in politics and its moral assessment, of the morally motivated resistance to oppression, with an eye on nonviolent politics, of the function(s) of the morally driven utopias in politics, of the moral underpinnings of power, and etc. The course aspires to demonstrate the impossibility of "value-free" politics and at the same time the specificity of "political morality" and its distinction from the "morality of private life".
Learning Objectives
- To explicate the distinctiveness of political morality in its tension-ridden relationships with “morality as such” (sometime slabeled as “private morality”) and political ethicsperse.
- To present a cognitive map of the field of contemporary discourse over political morality and to bring to light the strength sand weakness of the major theoretical approaches to it.
- To elucidate a distinction between morality as a set of principles where by politics can be normatively assessed (in one way or another) on one hand and political morality as a guiding light of actual political activities on the other, that is, between a kind of morality, which evaluates and instructs politics, and a different kind of it, which works “inside” politics.
- To define and locate the aforesaid distinction on the two levels of moral reflections on politics – that of the “spectator” and that of the “actor” (political agency).
- To trace the implementation/manifestation of political morality in actual political practices and strategies ,such as anticolonial struggles, civil disobedience, revolutionary dictatorships, etc., which will serve as the “case studies” for testing the validity of the theoretical insights into the “nature” of political morality discussed hitherto.
Expected Learning Outcomes
- Advancement of the students’ grasp of ethics by means of connecting theoretical ethics with applied ethics.
- Augmentation of the students’ knowledge of contemporary philosophy through their exposure to the contemporary debates over political morality.
- Enhancement of the students’ ability to pursue a “problem-oriented” rather than a “method-driven” strategy of research (as it can be applied to the ethical quandaries, riddles and dilemmas o fpolitics).
- Improvement of the students’ analytical and polemical skills in matters of ethical judgments and ethical-political discourse.
- Intensification and enrichment of the students’ awareness of the ethical dimension of political life and furtherance of their ability to critically and independently form their theoretical and practical position in relation to it.
Course Contents
- Introduction and Prolegomena
- Violence as a Problem of Political Morality
- Acting from moral principle - the political philosophy of civil disobedience
- Moral utopias and their divergent roles in politics
Interim Assessment
- 2025/2026 2nd module0.5 * Oral exam + 0.125 * Research paper + 0.125 * Research paper + 0.125 * Сlass work + 0.125 * Сlass work
