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.
War and Ecological Concerns: Advances in technology, industry, and military weapons confront us with unprecedented new abilities for destruction in wars and for degrading significant portions of the planetary biosphere or for altering long standing climate and temperature patterns We will examine Christian and Hindu traditions on war and peacemaking during the first section of the course. We will explore the history of Western thinking on pacifism, the just war theory and also crusader war. Likewise we will attend to the rise of modern warfare with its new powerful weapons systems that give rise to new moral challenges and issues of moral responsibility in the conduct of war. In the second section of the course we will examine the status of the contemporary scientific debates about the gravity of various trends¿and the cultural, societal, economic and political reasons behind the continuing slowness of America to engage these ecological threats in a serious manner. We will concentrate on how emerging ecological threats and climate change concerns vastly expand our traditional understanding of our moral responsibilities. Religion is a powerful shaper of ideas and of human action and we will examine some of the resources that different religious traditions of the world offer for promoting efforts at peacemaking and ecological responsibility. We will look at various religious and philosophical traditions and see how they describe nature, how they evaluate nonhuman nature¿s relationship to humanity, how they define ¿community¿ to include or exclude the nonhuman world, and how they relate or do not relate the ¿sacred¿ to the natural world.
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