Course Description

Catalog Course Description

``The moral principles of conduct and the basic principles underlying these principles such as good, evil, right, wrong, justice, value, duty, and obligation. The ethical works of philosophers are analyzed in terms of these concepts. Three semester hours.'' From the Lander University Catalog.

Textbook

Lee Archie and John G. Archie. Introduction to Ethical Studies: An Open Source Reader. Version 0.11 GFDL, 2003. Free for use or resale under terms of the GFDL license. (Not available at the Lander Bookstore.)

The textbook is available in these formats: HTML:
http://philosophy.lander.edu/ethics/ethicsbook/book1.html
PDF:
http://philosophy.lander.edu/ethics/ethicsbook.pdf
MP3:
http://philosophy.lander.edu/ethics/mp3/ (Under development).
Current Tarball:
http://philosophy.lander.edu/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/
CVS Repository:
http://philosophy.lander.edu/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/ethics-book/
Booknotes and tutorials for the supplementary readings are available at
http://philosophy.lander.edu/ethics/notes-topics.html

Purpose of the Course

The class essentially centers around three topics:

1. What is the nature of the life of excellence?
2. What is the ultimate worth of the goals you seek?
3. How do you rightly obtain your life goals?

Although these questions are simply stated, they prove to be most difficult to clarify. The objective of the course is for you to establish some good answers to these questions in light of a critical analysis of several important theories of ethics, including, among others, the ethics of Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Aurelius, Epictetus, Hume, Spinoza, Kant, Mandeville, Bentham, Mill, Bain, Nietzsche, James, Ohiyesa, Ellwood, Westemarck, and Moore.

Objectives of the Course

Some specific aims of our ethics course include these questions:

1. What are the differences among folkways, mores, morals, ethics, and metaethics?
2. What are the distinctions among moral, nonmoral, amoral, and immoral concerns?
3. What are cultural relativism, ethical relativism, ethical absolutism, ethical nihilism, and ethical skepticism?
4. How do we distinguish contributing, necessary, and sufficient conditions for a good life?
5. What are the advantages and disadvantages to various criteria of truth, such as authority, consensus gentium, legality, conscience, revelation, intuition, science, and reason?
6. Why be moral?
7. What are the varieties of egoism and hedonism? Are these philosophies mistaken?
8. What are the central tenets of some classical theories of ethics?
9. What are the aims of duty ethics, religious ethics, naturalistic ethics, the ethics of self-realization, and utilitarianism?
10. What are the relations between an individual ethics and a societal ethics?

Specific Skills Achieved

Upon completion of this course, all students should be able to

1. demonstrate basic skills of Internet research, email, and Message Boards,
2. distinguish clearly among factual, attitudinal, and verbal disputes in ethics,
3. construct premisses and conclusions for inductive arguments,
4. identify the common fallacies in ethical reasoning,
5. evaluate various types of ethical theories,
6. identify the differences between a sound ethical theory and a persuasive ethical theory.
7. understand some of the common mistakes made in business, medical, and ecological, and environmental ethics as taught in other disciplines, and
8. understand some of the limitations of current theories of ethics and metaethics.

Course Procedures

The methods used to obtain these ends are

1. to learn to identify ethical arguments, to evaluate and counter them, and to construct good arguments,
2. to obtain the ability to relate arguments to one another and to judge the relative strength of different kinds of arguments,
3. to analyze different techniques of definition and kinds of meaning in ethics,
4. to obtain the ability to identify common mistakes in ethical reasoning and to reconstruct arguments to avoid them,
5. to gain skill in evaluating ethical theories,
6. to recognize the differences between the inductive and deductive sciences and how they relate to ethical theories,

7. to study classic, influential, and abiding methods of experimental inquiry into the nature of ethics,
8. to apply usefully the several methods of inductive reasoning in everyday life and ordinary language.

This course will help you gain skill in asking interesting, productive, and insightful questions and will analyze ethical passages to obtain facility in the clear, complete, and methodological understanding of their content. It will also help you to learn effective methods of analysis and criticism in the evaluation of ethical argumentation.