This class will explore fundamental issues at the intersection of ethics and social thought. Ethics is concerned with questions about the nature and proprieties of individual action, and social thought addresses larger social structures partly constitutive of the contexts in which individuals act. The ties between the two domains are, however, much more significant than this gloss on their core preoccupations suggests. Widely accepted assumptions about possibilities for social thought generally exert pressure on how ethical values are conceived, and ethical beliefs about the nature of values, and about how values enter our thinking, frequently inform or reinforce views about possibilities for social thought. Here we address this dialectic by considering some notable alignments between the twentieth and twenty-first histories of ethics and social thought. Our starting point will be utilitarianism and Kant’s ethical theory and how these two approaches in ethics have been shaped by, and in turn have shaped, received views about what social thinking is like. Central weeks of the semester will then be devoted to the surge of interest, starting in England in the mid to late twentieth century and continuing to the present, in neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics (and other related ethical naturalisms). What is at stake in this turn to virtue? Is it at bottom nothing more than the articulation of a new approach in ethics, to be set alongside utilitarian and Kantian approaches, that leaves established accounts of social thought untouched? Or does it call for a radical re-evaluation of deeply entrenched assumptions about social thought and action? In grappling with these questions, we will consider the writings of moral philosophers who present their stress on virtue as a call for a revolution not only in ethics but in how we conceive social and political questions. The closing weeks of the course will consider important alignments today between these trends in ethics and strains of radical social thought. Readings will include works by Julia Annas, Elizabeth Anscombe, Annette Baier, Cora Diamond, Philippa Foot, Marilyn Frye, Amitav Ghosh, bell hooks, Immanuel Kant, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Alisdair McIntyre, John McDowell, John Stuart Mill, Charles Mills, Iris Murdoch, and Bernard Williams.