Syllabus

Diploma Course in Comparative and Applied Ethics

Certificates, Modules and Units:




Certificate Course One: COMPARATIVE AND NORMATIVE ETHICS


Module One: Philosophical and Religious Ethics

Unit One (8 contact hours): Philosophical Ethics

This Unit engages in a comparative reflection over primary normative ethical theories.

  • Introduction: Ethical perspectives from universalism to relativism

  • Ethics of the Good (teleology) and the Right (deontology)

  • Natural Law and Virtue Ethics

  • Feminist ethics (including Care Ethics)

Unit Two (8 contact hours): Religious Ethics

This Unit features a comparison between the ethical worldviews of major religious traditions. It will also consider the basic question of the significance of religion in contributing toward the cultivation of an ethical consciousness.

  • Relationship between religion and ethics

  • Indic ethics

  • West Asian ethics

  • Contemporary ethical issues

Module Two: Social and Cultural Ethics

Unit Three (8 contact hours): Social Ethics

This Unit differentiates between major social and cultural ideologies and approaches with regard to the area of integral human development: liberal theories, socialist/communist theories, critical theory, capability approach.

  • Liberal (personalist) ethics

  • Liberationist (collectivist) ethics

  • Socially critical ethics (critical theory)

  • Developmental ethics (capability approach)

Unit Four (8 contact hours): Cultural Ethics

This Unit focuses on diverse cultural developments and how they contribute towards the creation of unique ethical perspectives and norms.

  • Classical, modern and post-modern ethics

  • Ethnocentrism and relativism

  • Cultural domination and assimilation (master-slave ethics: postcolonial and socially hierarchical critique)

  • Art and ethics

Certificate Course Two: APPLIED ETHICS

Module Three: Ethics of Science & Technology and Bioethics

Unit One (8 contact hours): Ethics of Science and Technology

This Unit features a reflection over various aspects of scientific development—their assumptions and consequences—in relationship with normative ethics.

  • Introduction: social and ethical aspects of science and technology

  • Technology and ethics

  • Cyberethics

  • Environmental ethics

Unit Two (8 contact hours): Bioethics

This Unit covers ethical reflection over divergent perspectives pertaining to various aspects of human life understood biologically, and the value of animal life. Key issues in these areas will be covered.

  • Ethics of medical science

  • Biomedical ethics: birth and death issues

  • Biomedical ethics: other issues

  • Animal rights

Module Four: Legal, Political and Economic Ethics

Unit One (8 contact hours): Legal Ethics

This Unit has to do with the relationship between law and ethics in theory and practice.

  • Fundamental rights and due process of law (Constitutional morality)

  • Natural Justice and Conflict of interest

  • Compensatory mechanisms and punishment in Civil and Criminal Law

  • Social inclusion (minority rights, affirmative action, migration)

Unit Two (8 contact hours): Political and Economic Ethics

This Unit deals with the ethical assumptions and implications of political and economic policy in the public and private sphere.

  • State and individual: responsibility and accountability

  • Sovereignty and inter-national ethics

  • Business ethics

  • CSR