Honors Capstone: Moral Responsibility
This course is the capstone of the Interdisciplinary Honors Program and may be taught from the disciplinary perspectives of philosophy or theology. Students will be able to analyze ethical theories and to apply principles of ethical reasoning and individual moral responsibility to contemporary social issues and questions that arise in everyday life.
Students must have 75 credit hours or more to enroll.
This course is the capstone of the Interdisciplinary Honors Program and may be taught from the disciplinary perspectives of philosophy or theology. Students will be able to analyze ethical theories and to apply principles of ethical reasoning and individual moral responsibility to contemporary social issues and questions that arise in everyday life.
Students must have 75 credit hours or more to enroll.
Prerequisites: 75 credit hours or above. Restricted to students in the Honors Program.
Restricted to Students in the Honors Program.
The Ethics of Identity: A key text in discussions of ethics is Immanuel Kant¿s 1785 treatise Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, which offers various formulations of its famous ¿categorical imperative,¿ one of which demands that persons treat themselves and other persons not merely as means to achieving ends but as ends in themselves, as rational agents. Means to ends are instruments or tools, and a key question of this course is whether collective or group identities, in calling upon us to act in ways that advance the ends of our identity group, position us as instrumentalities of that collective identity and thus demand that we violate the Kantian categorical imperative: does promoting our collective identity require us to reduce ourselves, unethically, to mere means or instruments in the service of advancing our identities as ends in themselves, as autonomous agencies acting in and through us? After establishing the basic terms of this debate, we will work through a series of case studies drawn from U.S. literary history in order to assess how prominent writers depicted and addressed the ethical dilemmas raised by national, racial, and gender identity.
Prerequisites: 75 credit hours or above.
Spring 2023 Course Description
HONR 301 "Ethics: Ethics and the Goals of Medicine"
As a practice, Medicine presumably has goals; such as the curing of disease, the prevention of death, the relief of suffering, etc. This course confronts complex ethical questions that arise when considering what the various goals of medicine ought to be, as well as how Medicine should pursue those goals. Euthanasia, the good of individual patients versus the good of society, the possibilities of genetic interventions, the conception of and treatment of "abnormalities," the pursuit of new knowledge versus the treatment of current patients. These issues (and many more) all raise difficult ethical questions. The goal of the course will be to firther our awareness and inform our judgment concerning such questions.
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