Compass Course: Love, Death, and Taxes - Moral and Social Questions about the Human Condition

We propose to create a new, ambitious, cross-disciplinary subject (a "Compass Course") in response to the needs among MIT undergraduates for (a) analytic inquiry and active debate about persistent moral and social questions concerning the human experience; (b) a shared conversation on these questions across the diverse students and departments at MIT; and (c) a collective engagement with historical and contemporary work in the humanities, arts and social sciences. We will explore concepts like justice, democracy, as well as right and wrong, insisting that these are not matters of personal taste but the warp and woof of a complex social fabric. Moral order exists, whether shared or contested, and human beings habitually engage with as well as against that ordering. Fourteen faculty from across SHASS are collaborating to teach this new course beginning in Spring 2025.