PHIL 250 (online)

PHIL 250: Contemporary Ethical Issues (online)
Instructor: Peter Andes

Course Description

Is morality objective or subjective? How should we figure out the right thing to do? Is morality fundamentally about promoting happiness? Doing your duty and respecting the dignity of human beings? Following useful conventions? Having good character? Caring for others? Are there absolute moral rules that can never be broken or are there always exceptions to every rule? How should we reason carefully about issues like abortion, euthanasia, and climate change?

This course is an introduction to systematic ethical reasoning and its application to important practical issues. We will begin by considering whether ethics can be objective, the nature of moral judgments, and what method we should use to pick our moral principles. We will examine seven metaethical theories: relativism, subjectivism, supernaturalism, ideal observer theory, intuitionism, emotivism, and prescriptivism. Next, we will explore proposed general requirements of ethical reasoning (consistency and impartiality) by examining the Golden Rule.

Along the way we will explore a number of normative approaches: virtue theory, Kantianism, natural law theory, social contract theory, act and rule utilitarianism, Rossian pluralism, and the ethics of care. We will then begin our consideration of applied issues with distributive justice and a look at John Rawls’s theory of justice and the libertarianism of Robert Nozick. We will proceed to study the ethics of life-and-death questions, with applications to abortion and euthanasia, and our obligations to (nonhuman) animals. Next, we will examine our duties to aid and global poverty. We end with a discussion of the ethics of procreation and climate change.

The course will meet synchronously once a week for discussion, with asynchronous lecture recordings.