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.
This course explores "moral responsibility" as an ethical practice primarily in two challenging spheres of contemporary life: war and peace concerns and ecological concerns. Advances in technology, industry, and military weapons confront us with unprecedented new abilities for damaging human communities and for degrading significant portions of the planetary biosphere pushed by climate change and other trends. These capacities are new and are challenging. We will examine Christian and Hindu traditions on war and peacemaking during the first section of the course. We will explore the history of modern conventional war, guerrilla war and the development of nuclear arsenals. In the second section of the course we will concentrate on how emerging ecological threats and climate change concerns vastly expand our traditional understanding of our moral responsibilities. The expanding range of human powers to impact ecosystems, all habitats and species, and our climate patterns means that we have a corresponding expanding range of moral 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.
Required Books
Thomas Berry, The Great Work (New York: Bell Tower, 1999). Isbn 0-609-80499-5
Lester Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing To Save Civilization (NY: W.W. Norton, 2009). Isbn 978-0-393-33719-8
Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars New York: Basic Books; 3rd edition (January 2000)
ISBN-10: 0465037054 ISBN-13: 978-0465037056 (any edition is good)
Gandhi, All Men Are Brothers Bloomsbury Revelations. Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic; Reprint edition (June 27, 2013)ISBN-10: 1780938217 ISBN-13: 978-1780938219
Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010).
Class Details
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