Public Libraries of Suffolk County, New York

Moral decision making, how to approach everyday ethics, Professor Clancy Martin, University of Missouri-Kansas City

eng

bibliographyinstructional materials

Course guidebook includes bibliographical references

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lectures speeches

Moral decision making

sound recording audiobook CD

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Professor Clancy Martin, University of Missouri-Kansas City

The great courses. Topic: better living, subtopic: personal development

how to approach everyday ethics

From the course guide. We are all constantly confronted with moral challenges. A friend asks if you like his new beard: Do you lie and say yes or tell the truth and hurt his feelings? You discover that a friend is having an affair or "taking liberties" with office resources: What are you required to do, if anything? Morality forces its way into the most everyday decisions we make, such as recycling, whether or not to buy the "cage-free" eggs at the grocery store, and whether or not we should shop at the local stores or find the best price. What about the promotion that means spending less time with your family? How much do you owe your aging parents or your adult children? We all have intuitions about how best to handle moral situations -- and in our pluralistic society, many of us have differing moral intuitions -- yet we rarely stop to ask ourselves why we believe that we do. Can we defend our moral intuitions with good reasons? Are our various moral commitments consistent with one another? Do we often simply avoid thinking about what is the right or the wrong thing to do and follow that old familiar guide, habit? This course charts the terrain of the many great thinkers, in both the Western and Eastern traditions, who have wrestled with these and many other moral questions, difficulties and dilemmas. We will look as far back into our intellectual history as homer and Confucius to understand how we have come to formulate the moral opinions we have, and we will examine what contemporary Nobel Prize-winning thinkers, such as Kenneth Arrow, have to say about moral debates that continue to puzzle us today. Much of our course will focus on what great philosophers and moral leaders have said -- such thinkers as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Buddha, Abraham, Paul, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill. But we will also look at what contemporary neuroscience has to say about morality and especially how that applies to the ethics of everyday life. The course covers much of the history of the great theories of morality, but we always keep one eye focused on practice. All of the thinkers we discuss agree that theorizing about morality is useless if it doesn't help us each, as individuals, to solve moral problems and think through genuine moral challenges. By learning about the history and current state of intellectual theory in ethics, we will discover better techniques for recognizing moral problems when they present themselves, develop approaches for untangling the complicated knots morality can tie us in, and even arrive at concrete answers for many common moral dilemmas. Most importantly, we will learn how to ask ourselves tougher questions about what the good life is and what kind of ethical challenges it presents. We will broaden our worldview about value. And we will recognize the very often that we thought was ethically simple and straightforward is actually much more complex, morally speaking, than it first appears. We will become experts in ethics -- and experts in confronting our own moral mistakes, prejudices, and hypocrises

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