Teaching & Learning About EthicsTeaching & Learning About Ethics
With the exception of students who pursue a concentration in philosophy, undergraduate liberal arts students at Michigan are not required to take any courses that focus on moral inquiry.
The Department of Philosophy offers an extensive set of courses on ethics. Each term a number of sections of Introduction to Philosophy are devoted to topics that fit the “ethics in public life” rubric. For students interested in studying ethics in depth, the Department offers PHIL 361: Ethics and a variety of advanced courses. It also offers each year several large-enrollment courses in applied ethics: PHIL 355: Contemporary Moral Problems, PHIL 356: Issues in Bioethics and PHIL 359: Law and Philosophy. These courses are taught by regular faculty and are fully enrolled nearly every term, a sign that demand for such courses exceeds the supply.
Philosophy 160, Moral Principles and Problems, introduces students to principles of moral philosophy, and provides them with an opportunity to apply what they learn to real-life situations. The overarching goal is to enable students to develop the conceptual resources and argumentative skills they need to think about controversial ethical issues in a critical way. The lecture will offer a systematic introduction to moral theory, aimed at providing students with the resources to analyze moral problems and develop their own moral positions. The primary focus will be normative ethics, that is, philosophical theories about the nature and principles of moral rightness and wrongness. The dominant traditions in normative ethics natural rights theory, social contract theory, and consequentialism will be our main focus, though we may also consider egoism, divine command theories, virtue theories, and moral particularism. Some topics from meta-ethics will also be discussed, such as relativism vs. absolutism, subjectivism vs. objectivism, non-cognitivism vs. realism, and the question, “Why be moral?” Throughout an effort will be made to tie questions in ethics to empirical issues in psychology and social theory. Discussion sections will seek both to promote understanding of the lectures and to introduce students to moral issues that arise in some topic of special moral concern. Different discussion sections will focus on different topics: international justice (sections 002, 003), religion and morality (sections 004, 005), and health care (sections 006, 007). Students should enroll in the discussion section that best suits their interests. NOTE: Funding to develop this course was provided by the President’s Ethics in Public Life Initiative.
The offerings in Philosophy provide a very solid foundation for coursework in ethics for undergraduate students at the University.
The Residential College in LS&A is noteworthy for offering courses that address ethics in public life, particularly courses that combine classroom discussion with community engagement.
The Life Sciences and Society Program offers a wide range of educational resources focused on the ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI) that arise in the application of the life sciences. They have developed a web-based curriculum guide of courses that deal with ELSI issues at the intersection of the life sciences and society in business, engineering, public health, medicine, and religion. They are also sponsoring the development of web-based educational modules focusing on ethical issues in life science technologies and applications to allow faculty from across campus to more easily integrate these critical concepts into existing courses. A guest lecturer network is also being formed to provide a mechanism to facilitate this integration.
Other course offerings in ethics for liberal arts undergraduates are more scattered. The array of courses within the rest of LS&A that engage ethics in some fashion is impressive although these aspects are rarely featured in course titles or descriptions, so students searching for such courses must usually dig below departmental sub-concentrations and course titles to find them.
In this regard, it is interesting to compare the information available to LS&A undergraduates about ethics courses with that available to students at Duke, which several years ago instituted a degree requirement that students take two “ethical inquiry” (or EI) courses. Although the set of courses at Duke that are designated EI criteria is quite extensive, applying the same criteria to existing undergraduate courses at the University of Michigan would likely result in an even larger number of courses qualifying for EI designation. In many, if not most, of these courses, however, exposure to ethical inquiry is not explicitly featured in the catalog description of the course or in the syllabus. This means that students inclined to seek out courses that address ethics receive little guidance from the formal structure of the LS&A curriculum. One way in which we can address the student interest in ethics-related courses is to make them easier to identify.