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
College and its End(s):
The elemental questions with which this seminar is concerned—questions that likely will not yield elemental answers—are: what is an education and what is it for? These may seem strange questions to ask after the fact—that is, when your education is all but complete—but for reasons that hopefully will become evident, this line of inquiry in the final year of your college education (perhaps especially in that year) seems fitting. To state but one justification: the richness of an experience can in some ways be measured by the amount of subsequent reflection that experience merits. To state the matter differently, if the rumination of a person is indistinguishable from that of a cow, then that person has no meaningful education to speak of. In brief, this is a class on the purpose of an education and whether or not recent developments in higher education further that end or undermine it.
