Honors Class 3: Introduction to Ethics
Honors Ethics was by far the most insightful honors course I have taken at Longwood University. It didn’t appear that way at first though. When I heard that a philosophy course was required for a goal I was pretty disappointed. I would have rather learned about the era and historical context of philosophers than to learn about philosophers and their ideas themselves. I also held the misconception that ethics was a very clear-cut subject; as long as long as you do the right then, then you are okay. But Dr. Moore really focused on the question of what made a general moral principle or behavior “right”? Was it the ruling class of society? God? Or was there even such a thing as “right” and wrong”? These questions forced me to think about definitions I have always taken for granted, and put myself into another’s shoes who has different ethical believes than mine.
Dr. Moore analyzed theories like categorical imperative, utilitarianism, and prima facie duties, to name a few. But the difference between his course and regular courses is that he applied these theories into real scenarios. We studied controversial subjects and applied these different theories to each, and suddenly other viewpoints and ideas seemed to have valid arguments not previously thought about. For example, a cultural relativists would say MLK was immoral in his society, or that Hitler was morally right based on mainstream societies norms and values at the time. Examples like that seemed clearly wrong, but at least the class had reasoning from other side, an there was empathy across conflicting viewpoints. In short, ethics did exactly what it was supposed to do: allow individuals to analyze their moral codes and adjust them as necessary to different arguments.
Attached is an extractos I wrote regarding an article on selective immigration policies. An extractos takes an argument from an article and determines if it is a valid argument. In this case I found that the author’s argument for selective immigration policies was invalid and flawed.