PHIL 3019 - How Should I Live? Contemporary Ethical Theories

How should we live our lives, morally speaking? This is a big question, and philosophers have tackled it by breaking it down into three distinct but related questions, each of which is important and fascinating in its own right. These are meta-ethics (what type of thing are moral statements/questions?), normative ethics (which systematic approach to morality should we adopt?) and applied ethics (what should we do in some specific situation?). In this course we follow their lead and focus on one of the middle of these central questions - which normative theory should we use to provide a systematic account of what makes something right or wrong fundamentally? We will canvas accounts of moral theory using the traditional three approaches in the Western tradition - Consequentialism, Deontology and Virtue Ethics as a broad organising schema, but we will also look at accounts of moral theory from outside of the Western tradition. However the purpose of this course is not to merely present a range of ethical theories alongside each other and leave it there. Instead the aim is to put these theories into critical dialogue with each other with the goal of considering what the right theory of ethics might be. This will support students to clarify their own position regarding normative ethics. Our main focus will be on contemporary philosophical work, though there will also be opportunities to look at some of the historical roots of contemporary views.