Stunningly fantastic class. Hands down, I can confidently say that Brad is one of the best professors at UCLA. Great clarity in lecture, despite the convoluted concepts we wrangle with throughout this course. Extremely engaging and often displays his concern for students' learning. Never harsh or judgemental when students participate, ask questions, or even challenge the material!

There are two exams (one midterm, one final) and two papers. A very manageable workload, with lots of time and material provided to prepare. Both the TAs and Brad often host extra hours in the week(s) leading up to exam dates and paper due dates. They are extremely helpful and really get you to practice philosophy and increase your understanding.

There were no materials students needed to purchase. Brad would upload chapters and articles for us when necessary. Read them! Lectures often center around the arguments provided in those chapters, and Brad helps clarify and organize them to better suit learning.

Brad also uploads (nearly) weekly handouts that contain the specific wording of certain concepts and moral arguments. Extremely helpful and important! Most of the exam material can be sourced from the handouts as well as the lecture explanations regarding them.

Waner was my TA, and she is fantastic! Very willing to meet up for extra office hours, and provides easily understandable clarifications on the course material. Also, the most fashionable philosophy TA :))

Please take this class. I've had an amazing time in it; it really expands your understanding of moral issues today. During this quarter, we discussed obligations of aid towards people in need, abortion, as well as the issues regarding medical experimentation. If you thought you were informed on your stances before, think again. Put in the effort to learn in this class; you'll find that you'll get a lot more out of this than you initially thought!

I really enjoyed this class. The material itself is very interesting to me. Workload is really doable. I really like the professor. He is really engaging in the class, and explains concepts with a lot of interesting examples. He is extremely helpful in OH as well. If you listen to his class carefully, and finish what he asks, you will be set in the class. This is my favorite GE so far. Highly recommend!

Firstly, professor McHose is amazing. His lectures are superb. They are clear, concise, and super easy to follow. My favorite thing about Professor McHose is that he tells you what he is looking for in the assigned essays. It makes for a relatively straight forward writing process. Philosophy essays are not easy, and most people taking this class have not written one before, so it is difficult to score top marks on the first and second essays which makes it difficult to get an A in the class. In addition to this, there is not much graded work outside of the essays. There are a few small quizzes and some short response questions but other than that, you grade is largely determined by how you do on the essays. This class is not an easy A, but it is certainly doable if you are willing to go to office hours to improve your essay drafts. Basically, you can do pretty well without putting much effort into the class or you can take a little extra time and go above and beyond to finish at the top of the class.

*COVID-19 Review, be aware that this may differ from in-person classes*

Grading:
10% Quiz 1, 10% Quiz 2, 15% Quiz 3, 30% Paper 1, 35% Final Paper

I'm a STEM major and was just taking this class as a GE, so philosophy isn't really my forte. That said, Professor McHose made this class a fairly decent experience. He used interesting examples to illustrate concepts and broke things down in ways that made the material a bit easier to digest. There was no additional work apart from some readings and the assignments stated above. He makes his notes on the material available to view after each lecture which was very helpful.

Quizzes were all multiple choice and weren't awfully difficult, though some questions were worded in a way that was slightly trickier to get. He said that the MC aspect was for ease of grading while online, so things may not remain that way. The first paper prompt explicitly told us what was expected and didn't feel too difficult. The final paper prompt seemed a little vaguer and harder to understand in my opinion, and I wish we had either slightly more preparation for it or had an easier prompt. This may just be my STEM bias talking though. The TAs used discussion time to review the material, allow students to discuss and ask questions about it, and sometimes give tips on how to express our ideas on our papers. In general, both the professor and the TAs were kind and helpful.

TLDR: While philosophy isn't my personal favorite subject as a south campus major, professor Mchose's teaching style and the helpful TAs made this class still feel like a decent experience overall.

Light workload BUT be warned, this is NOT an easy class where you can bullshit your way through the content without really knowing it. If you want to succeed, you will have to pay attention in lectures and understand the material really well.

This was a really interesting class and easily the best GE that I have taken. His quizzes were a little challenging (due to the pandemic, they were asynchronous multiple choice where you had to apply the material we learned to analyze a moral argument), but he curved them so the distribution was fair. The essays were fairly easy because we received heavy guidance on writing them. The lectures were compelling and the content was enjoyable to think about even outside of class. I think it helped me shape my arguments in my daily life, reconsider opinions that I took for granted, and changed the way I approach big questions. Also his mini unit on formal logic was useful for my other subjects.

Highly recommend this class. It's not just some easy A, but it's a class where you won't mind putting the effort in to understand it.

This is my first time writing review because this class is so above my expectation. This is my first (and probably last) philosophy class. I have absolutely no former background or intensive interest towards philosophy. However, I would say prof McHose really made me interested in it. To be frank, I did struggle in this class for weeks (partly credit to the 12:30 class time), but I have to admit the professor did an excellent job in explaining all these concepts and arguments with examples. The grade is consisted of two papers and two exams. The time for the second paper is a bit tight so start preparing ahead! As for the exams, make sure you go to professor's office hour because that will help A LOT. Also, definitely recommend choosing Waner as your TA! She is super nice and structured for section. Definitely a doable philosophy class. The takeaway will be bigger than you thought.

The professor himself is SUPER funny and chill and he taught the subject VERY well!! His quizzes were kinda difficult though. I did okay on the first two (mid As), but I tanked the last one (mid C). He averages them up and then curves instead of dropping the lowest. I ended up with a low A average for my quizzes, which I felt was a VERY fair grade considering I straight up got a C on one of them.
His materials have unique and engaging examples, and his method of lecturing is very relaxed (colloquial words, jokes, funny examples, back-and-forth student participation, etc.), but also very structured at the same time (pre-made handouts you can follow along with, polls, tangents that make sense/are relevant, etc.).
The bulk of your grade are your two papers. There were no example papers to base your paper off of, but he does go over an overall structure-ish. We did not have to write a lot of original stuff (the first paper he gave us the introduction paragraph entirely), but the structure is VERY specific, so if you can follow that structure to a T, you'll do great. You're kind of thrown into it a little bit too though. However, he has mandatory 1-1 sessions with the TA to go over the papers, and if you listen to all of the criticisms, you should get an A on the second paper.
Overall, a super fun class! I would recommend, but you should probably put in some work in really getting the concepts rather than memorizing stuff or the papers and quizzes will mess you up.

Professor McHose took a different approach to political philosophy than I expected, the entire class emphasized exclusively distributive justice, so if you're interested in Nozick, Rawls, and Parfit, you will certainly enjoy the course.
My biggest complaint is the way he structures his quizzes, multiple answers are correct in each question and you're deducted points for not selecting all the correct ones, I averaged a B- on the quizzes despite feeling fairly confident about the material. But he does curve the quizzes so it wasn't two bad. He's certainly not the only professor to do this, but I felt it was worth mentioning.
Grades were made up of 3 papers, 3 quizzes, and participation.
If you haven't written philosophy papers before, listen very closely to his instructions, he helped me with my writing a lot!
Lecture was necessary because your papers had to reflect examples that were given in class. Lectures were recorded and uploaded after.
He was very flexible with the pandemic and meeting students needs, which I appreciated!

This was not an easy ge, but i definitely enjoyed it. The professor uses lots of examples and repeats himself a lot so that you understand the material, which is pretty helpful. In regards to the quizzes, they can be pretty tricky but if you go over the lectures and review them a lot you should be fine. In regards to the papers, just make sure you pay attention to what’s going on in class and really use the material you know, because that will help to show that you understand it (and that’s a good portion of the paper grade). The professor has a lot of extra office hours leading to the paper due dates, so take advantage of them if you feel like you’re lost on what to do. Overall, I enjoyed the class but I don’t think it’s for everyone. The professor was pretty funny and I thought he lectured well. We went over distributive justice almost the whole quarter and the papers consisted of explaining certain viewpoints on distributive justice and arguing for a certain type of distributive justice in the context of a health care policy.