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I have a long track record of university-level teaching in moral and political philosophy, first as a Postgraduate Teaching Assistant on various modules in UCL’s Philosophy Department, then in several stints as a Tutorials Tutor in UCL’s Philosophy Department, and most recently as an Associate Lecturer in Political Theory in UCL’s Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy. Over the course of this teaching history, I have taught the undergraduate and postgraduate modules below. I have also volunteered for the Philosophy in Prison charity.
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All public policy is based at least partly on ethical ideas; through their policies, governments aim to advance a vision of how the world should be. Just as those who exercise public power should be able to justify their policy decisions to citizens, citizens should be able to evaluate the policies that govern their societies. In this spirit, this module will explore the ethical ideas that underpin policy choices. Each week features a substantive policy issue as a means of illuminating key ethical concepts, theories and debates, and of developing a set of philosophical analysis and argumentation skills. In so doing, the module aims to equip students to think systematically and critically about fundamental issues in public policy, to make up their own minds about a range of contemporary policy issues, and to sharpen their skills of written and oral argumentation.
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This is a module in political theory. Political scientists ask: what is the world like? Political theorists, in contrast, ask a different question: what should the world be like?
Modern politics is marked by deep and entrenched inequalities of power. Should we be concerned if modern governments hold awesome power over their citizens? Or if modern corporations hold immense power over their employees? Should we be worried if men hold considerably more power than women? If Whites hold more power than Blacks? If countries in the Global North hold more power than those in the Global South? This module addresses the deeper philosophical and ethical issues that underlie these questions.
Students will examine the foundational theories and foundational theorists that shape political practice. The module achieves this through two approaches. On the one hand, students will tackle some of the key theories and concepts in contemporary political debate. We will focus on theories of freedom, using this as a launchpad to consider other key political concepts, including coercion and consent, legitimacy and democracy, domination and oppression, justice and equality, property and poverty. On the other hand, students will study some of the key theorists and activists in the history of political thought. They will examine canonical figures like Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Hayek, as well as some equally important, if less well-known, thinkers like Catharine Macaulay, Olympe de Gouges, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Kwame Nkrumah, Angela Davis, and the Black lesbian feminists in the Combahee River Collective.
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This tutorial-based module is designed to develop students’ philosophical study skills. Each tutorial group (maximum 4 students) will meet once a week with their tutor for an hour to discuss the set texts, to improve their understanding of these texts, to debate, and to improve essay-writing skills.
The texts and debates chosen for this module focus on metaphysical and ethical questions about dying and killing. Many of the texts are seminal contributions to the literature, thus students should expect to find them challenging but that they repay being read multiple times.
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This tutorial-based module is designed to develop students’ philosophical study skills. Each tutorial group (maximum 4 students) will meet once a week with their tutor for an hour to discuss the set texts, to improve their understanding of these texts, to debate, and to improve essay-writing skills.
The texts and debates chosen for this module focus on foundational issues in moral philosophy such as amoralism, subjectivism, relativism and the notion of the ‘good’. Many of the texts are seminal contributions to the literature, thus students should expect to find them challenging but that they repay being read multiples times.
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Moral philosophy can be divided into three basic areas: metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics. This is an advanced undergraduate and masters module in normative ethics, which is the area of moral philosophy concerned with substantive answers to the questions of how to act, how to live, and what kind of person to be. Over the course of the module, we will consider answers to these questions offered by theories of morality such as utilitarianism, contractualism, and virtue ethics. We will also consider the morality of risk-imposition, our intuitions about the trolley problem, and the (im)permissibility of inequality.
Syllabus (here).
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Philosophy in Prison is a charity set up in 2018 to promote philosophical education in prisons and to explore the practical and philosophical principles that this involves. Those in custody come from varying educational backgrounds. Some may have low literacy skills. Some may be disillusioned by education. Some may speak English as a second or even a third language. We use philosophical conversation to engage anyone who is interested, whatever their educational background. In 2024, I co-convened a 10-week course for inmates at a prison in South East England.