PHI118

SPRING SEMESTER

Lectures: 

Seminars: 

Module Outline: This module offers a critical introduction to the history of ethical thought in the West, examining some of the key ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Wollstonecraft, Douglass, Bentham, Mill, Taylor Mill, Nietzsche, Rawls and Gilligan.  It thus provides a textual introduction to some of the major types of ethical theory: the ethics of flourishing and virtue; deontology; utilitarianism; contractualism.  The close interconnections between ethics and other branches of philosophy (e.g. metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics) will be highlighted, as will the connections between ethics and other disciplines (e.g. psychology; anthropology).

Set text: Peter Singer (ed.), Ethics, 1994. Oxford University Press. (This will need to be bought: blackwells.co.uk are offering free U.K. delivery). Other recommended reading available online, either as e-books from the library or digitized in the module Resource List.