Course Description
Ethical inquiry of transformative texts from antiquity to the modern era, drawn from the Cornerstone: Learning for Living initiative emphasizing the interconnectedness of humanities and STEM. Themes include examining historical and contemporary definitions of ethics, what it means to be human or animal or machine, and individual and collective responsibility.
Athena Title
Ethics and Human Experience H
Equivalent Courses
Not open to students with credit in FCID 1001
Prerequisite
Permission of Honors
Semester Course Offered
Offered fall and spring
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student learning Outcomes
- Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to identify and analyze the textual and rhetorical features through which authors articulate ethical values and explain how those strategies are grounded in specific philosophical traditions, cultural belief systems, or historical conditions. Particular attention is paid to themes shared between sections of how texts define the limits of ethical action and volition, allocate responsibility between individuals and groups, and model human life, action, and obligation.
- Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to explain and critically assess how contemporary ethical standards, including norms of fairness, human rights, responsibility, and harm, shape modern interpretations of historical texts, including how readers’ own ethical assumptions derive from larger moral, legal, and social frameworks.
- Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to examine major ethical theories (e.g. duty-based ethics, consequentialism, virtue ethics, and relational ethics) and evaluate how these frameworks originate from particular philosophical, cultural, and historical foundations. Students will analyze how these origins structure the ethical choices authors embed in texts and shape the interpretive practices readers apply to them, in particular how standards of conduct are defined, justified and contested.
- Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to map the rhetorical, structural, and argumentative strategies through which authors and thinkers advocate for standards of conduct, demonstrating how these standards are grounded in identifiable ethical systems (e.g., duty-based ethics, utilitarian reasoning, virtue-based models) or culturally embedded moral worldviews.
- Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to critically evaluate how authors and thinkers justify ethical positions by appealing to philosophical principles, cultural norms, or inherited moral traditions, and analyze the tensions that arise when the foundational assumptions of different ethical systems come into conflict.
Topical Outline
- This is an interdisciplinary course based on the Teagle Foundation’s Cornerstone Learning for Living initiative. Texts selected vary from section to section, but there is commonality between sections: half of the texts in each section are drawn from a list of transformative texts compiled by faculty across the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, including the Bible, Hippocrates, Plato, Lucretius, Descartes, Darwin, Tolkien, Freud, Bradbury, and Goodall. Commonality is also fostered through shared pedagogical approaches: in-class writing, journaling, discussion, debate, role playing, oral presentations, and constructive critiquing. Shared themes across sections include the limits of ethical action and volition, individual and collective responsibility, and what it means to live and act as human.
- 1. Definitions of ethics, applied ethics, and ethical conduct based on the articulation of ethical values by various authors from antiquity to the present. Do historical and contemporary definitions differ on individual and collective responsibility?
- 2. Approaching texts from different cultures and time periods for commonality of themes involving ethical dilemmas.
- 3. Authorial framing: texts analyzed from the perspective of the author and how a reader engages with the text against the cultural backdrop of its composition. How are ethical values communicated? How are tensions and complexities that emerge when ethical principles conflict resolved?
- 4. What does it mean to be human, an animal, or a machine? Are ethics characteristic only of humans?
- 5. To whom are ethical standards of conduct applied? Are ethics only applicable to humans? How are ethical dilemmas resolved?
- 6. Who is responsible for ethical or unethical machines?
Institutional Competencies Learning Outcomes
Analytical Thinking
The ability to reason, interpret, analyze, and solve problems from a wide array of authentic contexts.
Critical Thinking
The ability to pursue and comprehensively evaluate information before accepting or establishing a conclusion, decision, or action.
