Course Description:
This introductory fifteen-week, two-credit course is designed to prepare students for more advanced studies in ethics in their respective field or profession. Through common readings and active learning centered on a semester-long individually-designed project in the context of that reading, this course exposes students to some of the basic categories and frameworks that ethicists use and provides opportunities for students to pursue their own curiosity regarding ethics as academic subject matter, whether in terms of practical contemporary ethical issues or abstract analysis and articulation of ethical assumptions, theories, and decision-making processes. It aims more than anything to help students think and communicate about ethical problems in a well-reasoned and critical manner, and to prepare them for further studies of ethics.
Students will learn to identify when and where ethical claims or assumptions are being made in texts and discussions, explicitly and implicitly. Students will learn to identify where ethical claims or ethical assumptions are supported (or not) by reasoned arguments, to supply their own reasoned arguments, and in many cases to provide a well-reasoned counter-argument to any given ethical argument. Finally, students will learn to describe in their own words examples of the kinds of questions that ethicists might ask, some of the fundamental issues that arise in ethical decision-making, and connections between ethics and other areas such as politics, culture, or civic engagement.
NOTE: Students should not take both the 4-credit and the 2-credit courses titled Introduction to Ethics as these overlap. Students who do not plan to continue with any further studies of ethics are encouraged to consider taking the 4-credit Introduction to Ethics course instead of this one.
This course partially meets the General Education requirement in Humanities.
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