Welcome to Introduction to Ethics

What does it mean to say that something is ethically good? This is an old question, but it is one that is surprisingly difficult to answer. In this class, we will be exploring various approaches to answering this question. These different answers are rooted in different ways of thinking about ethics, and in different kinds of ethical theory. These approaches may not all be compatible, but the better we can understand these approaches and their limitations, the more able we are to creatively engage with the ethical challenges that face us.

So in this course, we will also be putting our ethical theories to work. Over the duration of this course, we will develop a toolkit of different ethical theories, and then we will use the tools we have developed to explore some of the most important ethical issues of our time.

From the beginnings and end of life, to the ethics of war, from questions of social justice to our responsibilities towards other beings—animals, the environment, the natural world—we will ask how ethical theory can help us tackle real-world challenges.

I’m just setting up the website at the moment. But this will be the place for ongoing course notes from the classes. For every class, I will upload my own class notes for you to read. This will be useful for you to catch up if you miss a class (we’ll talk about attendance in our first class). I’ll also upload any extra links and snippets that may be interesting and fun. So this website is a living document!

About this site

I’ve designed the website to be very, very lightweight. This means that it uses a minimal amount of data, and so whatever your device, it should load easily and efficiently.

What isn’t on this site:

Cool interactive features
Fancy graphics and animations
Videos (though I may share links)
Things you have to log in to access

What is on this site:

Lots of words! It’s text all the way!
Useful information.
My class notes, updated after every class
Interesting ideas.
Links to interesting places.
Nice formatting, to make it easy to read.