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Ethical reasoning is a manner of thinking employed within philosophy to determine the moral rightness or wrongness of human actions in proportion to some notion of the good. This module examines a range of significant moral theories from the philosophical tradition which remain abiding options for human life in the present, namely, virtue ethics (Aristotle), utilitarian ethics (Mill), the ethics of duty (Kant), existential ethics (Kierkegaard), and ethics as first philosophy (Levinas). During this course, attention will also be given to the application of these theories to specific moral dilemmas (e.g., the ‘trolley problem’) as well as to some pertinent moral issues facing civilization today, such as the complexity of existing as both an individual and a member of society, the tension between our responsibility toward others and the freedom of our personal will, and the difference between simply following a set of conventional moral rules and committing oneself to one’s own moral intuitions.
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