Introduction to Ethics

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Introduction to Ethics

$79

Plus membership

3 Credits

All courses include:

eTextbooks

2 to 3-day turnaround for grading

Multiple chances to improve your grade

On-demand tutoring & writing center

Student support 7 days a week

$79

Plus membership

3 Credits

All courses include:

eTextbooks

2 to 3-day turnaround for grading

Multiple chances to improve your grade

On-demand tutoring & writing center

Student support 7 days a week

Introduction to Ethics

$79

Plus membership

3 Credits

About This Course

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ACE Approved 2025

Ethics is the human exercise of ordering, questioning, and investigating moral rules. According to philosopher Nina Rosenstand, ethics “questions and justifies the rules we live by, and, if ethics can find no rational justification for those rules, it may ask us to abandon them.”

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What You'll Learn

Demonstrate awareness of and ability to recognize ethical thinking.

Demonstrate knowledge of philosophical doctrines around ethics.

Develop and demonstrate competency in academic standards for the humanities.

Participate in global citizenship.

Develop competency in global philosophical models.

Perform applied ethics through the practice of academic integrity within academic writing.

Perform applied ethics through the development of original ethical analyses.

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Course Details

PHIL102

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Introduction to Ethics

Students in the course — Introduction to Ethics will learn established approaches within ethics and will directly participate in the human exercise of ordering, questioning, and investigating moral rules through original ethical analysis. Applied ethics, citizenship, and global diversity are emphasized in the curriculum.

Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites for this course.

Topic Subtopics
Checkpoint 1: Thinking About Values
  • Good and Evil
  • Debating Moral Issues from Religion to Neurobiology and Storytelling
Checkpoint 2: Learning Moral Lessons from Stories
  • Didactic Stories
  • The New Interest in Stories Across the Professions
  • The Value of Stories Across Time and Space
  • Are Stories Harmful? A New and Ancient Debate
Checkpoint 3: Ethical Relativism
  • How to Deal with Moral Differences
  • The Lessons of Anthropology
  • Problems with Ethical Relativism
  • Refuting Ethical Relativism
  • James Rachels and Soft Universalism
  • Ethical Relativism and Cultural Diversity
Checkpoint 4: Myself or Others?
  • Psychological Egoism: What About the Heroes?
  • Psychological Egoism: From Glaucon to Hobbes
  • Three Major Problems with Psychological Egoism
  • The Selfish-Gene Theory and Its Critics
  • Ethical Egoism and Ayn Rand's Objectivism
  • Being Selfless: Levinas's Ideal Altruism Versus Singer's Reciprocal Altruism
  • A Natural Fellow-Feeling? Hume and de Waal
Checkpoint 5: Using Your Reason
  • Jeremy Bentham and the Hedonistic Calculus
  • Advantages and Problems of Sheet Numbers: From Animal Welfare to the Question of Torture
  • John Stuart Mill: A Different Kind of Utilitarian
  • Mill's Harm Principle
  • Act and Rule Utilitarianism
  • Consequences Don't Count–Having a Good Will Does
  • The Categorical Imperative
  • Rational Beings Are Ends in Themselves
  • Beings Who Are Things
  • The Kingdom of Ends
Checkpoint 6: Personhood, Rights, and Justice
  • What Is a Human Being?
  • The Expansion of the Concept "Human"
  • Personhood: The Key to Rights
  • Science and Moral Responsibility: Genetic Engineering, Stem Cell Research, and Cloning
  • Questions of Rights and Equality
  • Distributive Justice: From Rawls to Affirmative Action
  • Criminal Justice: Restorative Versus Retributive Justice
Checkpoint 7: Virtue Ethics from Philosophy
  • What is Virtue? What is Character?
  • Non-Western Virtue Ethics: Africa and Indigenous America
  • Virtue Ethics in the West
  • The Good Teacher: Socrates' Legacy, Plato's Works
  • The Good Life
  • The Virtuous Person: The Tripartite Soul
  • Plato's Theory of Forms
  • Plato's Influence on Christianity
  • Empirical Knowledge and the Realm of the Senses
  • Aristotle the Scientist
  • Aristotle's Virtue Theory: Teleology and the Golden Mean
  • Aristotle's Influence on Aquinas
  • Some Objections to Greek Virtue Theory
Checkpoint 8: Virtue Ethics and Authenticity
  • Ethics and the Morality of Virtue as Political Concepts
  • Have Virtue, and Then Go Ahead: Mayo, Foot, and Sommers
  • The Quest for Authenticity: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and Levinas
Checkpoint 9: Case Studies in Virtue
  • Courage of the Physical and Moral Kind
  • Compassion: From Hume to Huck Finn
  • Gratitude: Asian Tradition and Western Modernity
  • Virtue and Conduct: The Option of Soft Universalism
  • Diversity, Politics, and Common Ground? A Personal View
Checkpoint 10: Different Gender, Different Ethics?
  • Feminism and Virtue Theory
  • What Is Gender Equality?
  • Women's Historical Role in the Public Sphere
  • The Rise of Modern Feminism
  • Classical, Difference, and Radical Feminism
Checkpoint 11: Applied Ethics
  • The Question of Abortion and Personhood
  • Euthanasia as a Right to Choose?
  • Media Ethics and Media Bias
  • Business Ethics: The Rules of the Game
  • Just War Theory
  • Gun Rights or Gun Control?
  • Animal Welfare and Animal Rights
  • Ethics of the Environment: Think Globally, Act Locally
  • The Death Penalty
  • The Ethics of Self-Improvement: Narrative Identity
  • A Final Word

Your score provides a percentage score and letter grade for each course. A passing percentage is 70% or higher.

Assignments for this course include:

  • 4 Benchmarks
  • 2 Capstones
  • 11 Checkpoints

All course readings can be found within the course and are adapted from:

Rosenstand, Nina. The Moral of the Story: An Introduction to Ethics. 2024 Release. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2024. ISBN: 9781266549366


Introduction to Ethics students also take:

English Composition I

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