Classical Ethics: Informing Modern Decision-Making
CLAS 3080
3 hours
Classical Ethics: Informing Modern Decision-Making
Course Description
Fundamental ethical ideas on interpersonal relationships and best business practices as written about and lived by ancient philosophers in the classical world. Course is designed to facilitate dialogue between the ancient and modern through the reading of non-Abrahamic discussions of living ethical lives and making good decisions with the aim that students understand and apply these ancient ideas to their public and private lives.
Athena Title
Classical Ethics
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student learning Outcomes
Students read fundamental ethical texts—Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic—in order to understand how non-Abrahamic Mediterranean philosophies addressed ethical issues pertinent to human beings in their private and public lives.
Students write assigned essays that are designed to augment interpretive, synthetic, rhetorical, and compositional skills.
Students interpret, deliberate, and defend a wide range of ethical choices presented in the assigned texts read each week. This practice exercises and improves deductive and inductive reasoning skills and requires students to analyze choice as it affects the self and the other.
Students discuss application of knowledge of ethics (ancient and modern comparisons) to common lived experience in the 21st century. This lived experience includes decisions made in personal life and public life (stressing in the latter category professional and business decisions).
Topical Outline
Learning How to Make Ethical Judgments
What is My Purpose in the World?
Self-Discipline and Deliberate Living
Why Should I Choose to Do Good?
Ethical Choices in Profit-Making
Ethical Choices in Leadership
The Stoic Model of Doing Business
What is the Good Life?
What is Excellence?
Mortality as a Lesson in Ethics
TEXTS
The ancient authors that we will read are the following: Plato, Seneca the Younger, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Cicero, Plutarch, Aristotle, and Valerius Maximus.
These texts are supplemented by modern works on ethics and the process of making ethical choices in our personal and work lives: David Brooks’ The Road to Character and John C. Maxwell’s There’s No Such Thing as Business Ethics.
