ETHICAL REASONING SEM (ECC490W)
(01/17/2024-05/07/2024)
Course Memo
Prerequisite: Senior Standing.
The purpose of this senior seminar is to help students assess what they have learned as undergraduate students and translate that learning into their behavior in the world. The course also acts as a bridge to life-long learning. Classes are conducted in a discussion format and address a broad range of ethical questions on which individual courses will focus. Ethical Reasoning Capability course.
Course Section Description
The Ethics of Time and Attention:
Ours is an era marked by a collapse of time and attention as they used to exist. Gone are the days of communication taking days, weeks, or longer. We live today instead in a state of incessant and unrelenting “nowness.” That is, we have grown accustomed to and reliant on the instantaneous information made possible by our digital devices and the Internet that connects them. Gone, similarly, are the days of focused attention. Smartphones, with their buzzing and ringing, seemingly endless notifications, and access to several billion gigabytes of information online, have fundamentally altered our capacities for sustained focus. Our time and attention have become subjected to new expectations in the workplace, new pressures in our interpersonal relationships, and a numbness wrought by a 24/7 news cycle. All of this has led to a profound state of precarity—that is, of uncertainty and exhaustion. Indeed, many in society, particularly those on the margins, are profoundly tired. In a precarious society overrun by demands on our attention and built upon technology and media fueled by our time, it is difficult to live, let alone fight against these regimes. We live, to put it frankly, with decreased capacities for navigating the social, political, economic, ecological, and other ethical issues facing our country, our cultures, our planet. This ethical reasoning seminar will attune to these issues through a sustained focus on the ethics of time and attention and will consider strategies for resisting the demands on our attention and time. Areas of assessment will include exams, quizzes, three reflective writing projects, regular reading, attendance, and in-class engagement.
