Course Code: Gen. Ed.

1253

Course Title: Ethics

No. of Units: 3 units

Course Description:

This is a 3-hour per week session or a total of 48 hours for the whole semester.
This course is organized according to the three main elements of the moral
experience:
a. The agent including context –cultural, communal, and environmental
b. The act
c. The reason or framework (for the act).
Module 1 The Scope and Meaning of Ethics (6 hours)
1. Definition of Ethics
2. Morality and other phases of Human Life
3. Human Acts
Module 2 The Moral Agent (12 hours)
1. Culture in moral behaviour
a. Culture and its role in moral behaviour
b. What is cultural relativism? Why is it not tenable in ethics?
2. The moral agent. Developing virtue as habit
a. The development of moral character
b. The circular relation between acts that build character and acts that emanates
from character
c. Moral development – Stages of moral development
d. Conscience -based moral decisions
Module 3 – The Act (12 hours)
1. Feelings and decision –making
 a. Feelings as instinctive and trained response to moral dilemmas
b. Obstacles to making right decisions
c. Making a right decisions
2. Reasons and impartiality as minimum requirements for morality
a. Reasons and impartiality defined
b. The 7-step moral reasoning model
3. Moral Courage
a. Why the will is as important as reason
b. Developing the will
Module 4 – Frameworks and Dispositions behind our Moral Disposition (12
hours)
A. Virtue Ethics
1. Aristotle
a) Telos
b) Virtue as habit
c) Happiness as virtue
2. St. Thomas Aquinas
a) The natural and its tenets
b) Happiness as constitutive of moral and cardinal virtues
B. Kant and rights theorists
1. Kant
a. Good will
b. Categorical Imperative
2. Different kinds of right
a. Legal
b. Moral
 C. Utilitarianism
1. Origins and nature of theory
2. Business’s fascination with utilitarianism
D. Justice and fairness. Promoting the common good
1. The nature of the theory
2. Distributive justice
a. Egalitarian
b. Capitalist
c. Socialist
Module V. Ethics and Religion ( 6 hours)
1. The Search for pluralism and fundamentalism
2. The role of religion in ethics
3. The religious response