The discussion of the disordered soul continues with a reflection on the Stanley Milgram’s famous studies, in which participants were directed to perform harmful actions that ran counter to their reflective moral commitments. Interestingly, such demands were more likely followed when the commander was closer to the subject and the victim further away. What is it about proximity to others that has this effect on us? Professor Gendler goes on to discuss the relationship between social attachment and human flourishing, reviewing Harlow’s wire mother/cloth mother experiments on non-human primates, studies of attachment styles in infants, and cross-cultural research demonstrating the importance of social relationships for flourishing and health.

1. Introduction
2. The Ring of Gyges: Morality and Hypocrisy
3. Parts of the Soul I
4. Parts of the Soul II
5. The Well-Ordered Soul: Happiness and Harmony
6. The Disordered Soul: Thémis and PTSD
7. Flourishing and Attachment
8. Flourishing and Detachment
9. Virtue and Habit I
10. Virtue and Habit II
11. Weakness of the Will and Procrastination
12. Utilitarianism and its Critiques
13. Deontology
14. The Trolley Problem
15. Empirically-informed Responses
16. Philosophical Puzzles
17. Punishment I
18. Punishment II
19. Contract & Commonwealth: Thomas Hobbes
20. The Prisoner's Dilemma
21. Equality
22. Equality II
23. Social Structures
24. Censorship
25. Tying up Loose Ends
26. Concluding Lecture

Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature pairs central texts from Western philosophical tradition (including works by Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, Hobbes, Kant, Mill, Rawls, and Nozick) with recent findings in cognitive science and related fields. The course is structured around three intertwined sets of topics: Happiness and Flourishing; Morality and Justice; and Political Legitimacy and Social Structures.