Skip to main content

That Intro to Ethics Course

Image result for philosophy symbol

I've just been reading a blog by a philosophy professor who discusses the attitude with which he approaches his Intro to Ethics course.

The practical upshot of the course should be to get students to reflect on the issues of morality in their own life in a systematic way, opening up reflection.

There are two distinct approaches possible, and they will depend on the teacher, the college and the student body it recruits. For some Intro to Ethics courses, this course will be a "primer for higher courses" in applied ethics or delving deeper into ethical theory. If a given department views the course in this way, the instructor has to concern himself with harmony within the curriculum. Is A in fact leading toward BCD etc.?

On the other hand, and especially given a "core curriculum," an Intro course may be taught with the presumption it is the only ethics (or perhaps the only philosophy) course that various of its students will ever take. In that case of course the issue of inter-departmental harmony falls by the wayside.

In the latter case especially, this professor suggests a lot of reading from the primary sources, anthologies with heaping helpings of Kant, Aristotle, and Mill.
A blog that

 He seems to think though that if the goal is to serve as an introduction to the department's other offerings, the Intro to Ethics course would be better off with a textbook approach arranged thematically rather than historically, starting with meta-ethics, proceeding to substantive ethics, and concluding with some topical readings in matters of applied ethics.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more