Katharina Nieswandt
Ethics in Society Postdoctoral Fellow
Katharina Nieswandt received her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh in 2015. Her thesis examined whether moral rights are invented or discovered. She developed a theory of rights that combines elements of social constructivism with Aristotelian naturalism. Her current project is to apply this theory to economic rights. Katharina is particularly interested in debt and political rule, the foundations of property rights, and the idea of a basic income.
Katharina will teaching in spring 2016:
Economic Justice:
What is Private Property, and What (if Anything) Justifies It?
Seminar. The focus is on private property. Questions include: Is property a natural right or a social construction? How does our current, global system of poverty allocation work? What things are fit to be private property/a commodity? (Can we sell our body? Our vote? Natural resources?) The readings are a mix of philosophical classics (such as Locke and Marx), recent publications, (e.g., Thomas Piketty, David Graeber), and empirical case studies. Prerequisites: none.
Course satisfies WAYS: Ethical Reasoning (ER)
