Descriptions for ETHS 390 - Fall 2016
ETHS 390-01A: Sport Ethics
Janna LaFountaine
This course will introduce students to a variety of theories of moral reasoning, ethical and unethical behavior in sport, and the development of moral education through sport. Students will engage in learning about how they should act in order to support the moral foundation necessary for sport to function. Students will wrestle with questions such as "how should I act" or "what type of an athlete, coach, official, manager, fan or parent should I be" through readings and discussions. Decision-making models based on moral reasoning theory and other principles of strategic reasoning will be employed as students navigate case studies and issues related to sport. This course has a required 20 hour Service Learning component. Fall and Spring.
ETHS 390-02A: Others
Anthony Cunningham
We share our lives by both necessity and design with others. Born utterly dependent, we rely entirely upon the care and kindness of others for our very survival. Even when we no longer depend upon others to feed, clothe, and protect us, we must figure out what sorts of responsibilities we bear to others and what responsibilities they have to us. Some people may seem relatively distant, bound to us only in the basic sense that we share in some common humanity. Others can seem so important to us that we might not wish to go on without them. In this course we'll examine the responsibilities we bear to each other in various respects-as human beings, as friends, as family, as brothers and sisters in common causes. We'll also look at the ways in which people turn their backs on others and misuse them in cruel and oppressive ways. Using sources drawn from philosophy, literature, history, memoir, and the social sciences, we'll put our minds to what we owe others and what others owe us.
ETHS 390-03A: Others
Anthony Cunningham
We share our lives by both necessity and design with others. Born utterly dependent, we rely entirely upon the care and kindness of others for our very survival. Even when we no longer depend upon others to feed, clothe, and protect us, we must figure out what sorts of responsibilities we bear to others and what responsibilities they have to us. Some people may seem relatively distant, bound to us only in the basic sense that we share in some common humanity. Others can seem so important to us that we might not wish to go on without them. In this course we'll examine the responsibilities we bear to each other in various respects-as human beings, as friends, as family, as brothers and sisters in common causes. We'll also look at the ways in which people turn their backs on others and misuse them in cruel and oppressive ways. Using sources drawn from philosophy, literature, history, memoir, and the social sciences, we'll put our minds to what we owe others and what others owe us.
ETHS 390-04A: Justice in the 21st Century
Dan Finn
Few issues are as fundamental to human life as justice: everyone is in favor of it. Yet few issues are as controversial: justice has widely divergent meanings for different people. This course will examine in detail five rival understandings of justice prevalent in debates today. Students will read two novels, and five philosophical or theological treatments of the notion of justice in our joint efforts to come to grips with what justice means in our lives: personally and on a national and global scale. Like all Ethics Common Seminar, the goal of this course is to improve each student's ability to make good moral judgments.
ETHS 390-05A: Good, Evil and the Limitations of Nature
John Houston
All of us are familiar with the terms "good" and "evil". Furthermore, we have all at some time used these terms in reference to persons or their actions. This phenomenon is the focal point of this class. In this course we will seek to address a variety of questions related to good and evil. Some of these questions include: What are the conceptual origins of our judgments about good and evil? Can we objectively say of some actions or persons that they are good or evil?-Or do terms like good and evil merely serve as expressions of our individual preferences? In virtue of what do we describe people as good or evil? Are some people born evil and others good, or do they become so? If they become so, how does this happen? Philosophers and famous literary personalities have grappled with these questions. We will draw upon their resources to reflect on these questions and attempt to articulate our own answers to them. In this course students will be required to read, think, write, attend class, and contribute to thoughtful dialogue.
ETHS 390-06A: Reading for Life
Anthony Cunningham
Everyone loves a good story. Great stories can provide us with far more than mere recreation. Stories can provide us with rich character portraits that can reveal the subtleties and nuances of what it means to live well and responsibly. In this course we'll use novels and films to address Socrates' most basic ethical questions, "How should one live?" and "What sort of person should I be?" We'll do so by attending to all the concrete, particular details of real life and fictional characters thoroughly embroiled in the "business of living." Reading well offers the possibility of vicarious experience and ultimately, ethical insight. Our readings will include:
The Crucible (Arthur Miller); Ransom (David Malouf); The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro); Beloved (Toni Morrison); Hecuba (Euripides); How To Be Good (Nick Hornby); Glengarry Glen Ross (David Mamet); Cold Mountain (Charles Frazier); The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Richard Flanagan)
ETHS 390-07A: Healthcare Ethics
Kathy Ohman
This course directs students to re-think ethics in today's system of healthcare, where the best possibilities for ethical healthcare in this century lie beyond traditional and mainstream thought. Students will question assumptions guided by the major principles of healthcare ethics and reflect deeply on clinical cases across healthcare disciplines from the perspective of professional and consumer.
Ethics Common Seminar Learning Outcomes:
- Identify ethical issues inherent in situations common in modern life and professional careers in healthcare.
- Articulate multiple theoretical perspectives on contested ethical issues.
- Articulate coherent arguments in support of personal normative judgments about contested ethical issues, including arguments that are grounded in ethical and other analytical or scholarly perspectives.
- Demonstrate a critical understanding of the conceptual foundations of the ethical and other scholarly perspectives addressed in the course.
ETHS 390-08A: Reading for Life
Jason Barrett
Everyone loves a good story. Great stories can provide us with far more than mere recreation. Stories can provide us with rich character portraits that can reveal the subtleties and nuances of what it means to live well and responsibly. In this course we'll use novels and films to address Socrates' most basic ethical questions, "How should one live?" and "What sort of person should I be?" We'll do so by attending to all the concrete, particular details of real life and fictional characters thoroughly embroiled in the "business of living." Reading well offers the possibility of vicarious experience and ultimately, ethical insight. Our readings will include:
The Crucible (Arthur Miller); Ransom (David Malouf); The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro); Beloved (Toni Morrison); Hecuba (Euripides); How To Be Good (Nick Hornby); Glengarry Glen Ross (David Mamet); Cold Mountain (Charles Frazier); The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Richard Flanagan)
ETHS 390A-01A to 02A: Healthcare Ethics
Georgia Hogenson
This course directs students to re-think ethics in today's system of healthcare, where the best possibilities for ethical healthcare in this century lie beyond traditional and mainstream thought. Students will question assumptions guided by the major principles of healthcare ethics and reflect deeply on clinical cases across healthcare disciplines from the perspective of professional and consumer.
HONR 390A-01A: The Medical Professional in the Modern World
Jeffrey Anderson
The word "professional" today connotes an individual with well-developed skills, specialized knowledge, and expertise, who conforms to the standards of a profession. The original meaning of "professional" as one who "makes a profession of faith" in the face of demanding circumstances has been all but lost in the medical profession. This class will use the burgeoning literature of medicine, written by, for, and about medical professionals, in order to explore the full range of "professional" challenges facing today's medical professionals.
The practice of medicine is rife with ethical dilemmas. By exploring the efforts of medical professionals to counter the institutional forces that constrain them and to find their own solid ground to stand upon, this course aims to cultivate the habit of moral reflection in future medical professionals. Although this course will primarily focus on the experiences of medical doctors, it should also be of interest to those aspiring to other medical and non-medical careers.
PHIL 321-01A & 02A: Moral Philosophy
Erica Stonestreet
The questions of ethics--of how to live and what to do--are continually confronting us in public and private life. Philosophical ethics tries to organize ethical experience, presenting theories of good and bad, right and wrong to help guide us. In this course we will use significant Western philosophical texts from ancient times to the last few decades to study different approaches to the classic questions of ethics. The theories we'll discuss include virtue, Kantian, utilitarian, and care ethics. We'll examine the different ways each framework can contribute to arriving at answers to ethical questions, noting strengths and weaknesses, with an eye to understanding how these theories might guide us in our own ethical decision making.
PHIL 322-01A & 02A: Environmental Ethics
Charles Wright
Industrial civilization rests on a disordered relation between humankind and the earth, burdening the earth's living systems with harms such as global warming, collapsing ecosystems, species extinctions, contamination of ground and surface water, oceanic dead zones, toxic waste sites, and a variety of other ecological ills. In this class we'll first investigate philosophical and religious roots to this disordered relation - the ideas that made it all seem right and natural. Next we'll examine philosophical and religious thinking that illuminates the moral wrongs of our current relation and the possibilities for righting it. We'll then consider what a person ought to do. We'll try to address this question at a human scale, inquiring into the ethical implications of choices and decisions that students already make every day and will also be making in the relatively near future. We will see that everyday habits, choices, and decisions enact an environmental ethic. Students will have an opportunity to reflect deeply on the environmental ethical commitments shaping their lives and whether they ought to do something differently.
PHIL 325-01A & 02A: Feminist Ethics
Jean Keller
The U.S. women's movement is deeply indebted to the values of western liberalism. The Declaration of Independence's assertion that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" provided feminists with the intellectual grounds to argue that women, too, should be equal, thereby allowing them to argue for and, after 70 years of struggle, to win the right to vote. In the 1960s and 70s, the concept of equal rights fueled feminist activism with regard to a range of diverse issues-from ending gender segregated job ads, to eliminating quotas limiting the number of women who could go to college, ensuring that boys' and girls' sports received equal funding, and activism to ensure that men and women would receive equal pay for equal work.
Despite these and other ways in which the women's movement has been predicated on the concepts of equality, individual rights, autonomy, freedom, and fairness embedded in the justice tradition of western liberalism, in the past 30 years the field of feminist ethics has increasingly challenged the basic premises of this tradition. Feminist ethicists have argued that the conceptual tools of this tradition fundamentally misunderstand key aspects of women's lives and experiences and are inadequate to bring about the conceptual and social changes necessary to eradicate the oppression of women.
While feminist ethics has been developed in many different directions, in this course our primary focus will be multiple variants of care ethics, tracing its development from a "women's" ethic of interpersonal relationships to a critical tool for examining global inequalities.
PHIL 358-01A: Philosophy of Law
Joe Desjardins
This course will examine a wide range of philosophical and ethical topics about law. The first section of this course will start with a seemingly simple question: what is law? We will consider how several influential philosophers and legal theorists have answered this question, paying particular attention to the question of the relationship between law and ethics and the question of the role of judges (do they merely apply the law as it was originally intended, or do/should they interpret the law?) In a second section, we will examine a range of philosophical and ethical questions in civil law, such as responsibility; negligence; intentionality; actions and causality. In a third section, we will examine some ethical and philosophical issues in criminal law, including punishment; capital punishment; due process; the rights of defendants; guilt and innocence. Finally, we'll turn our attention to some constitutional law issues, including civil liberties; free speech; freedom of religion; equal treatment; privacy.