Week One – Three theories of ethics

From early childhood on, we live in a world of choices, actions and consequences. Some acts make us happy, others sad, some guilty, others proud, and many actions just get us through the day. We observe other people and experience feelings of empathy, sympathy, envy, embarrassment, censure. We judge (or “think about”) the actions of ourselves and others according to criteria gathered over time from family, friends, mentors and society at large.

Philosophers stand outside this “circle of living,” to observe the hows and whys of what we do and become who we are, and try to interpret that. So do artists, poets and novelists. But philosophers choose to situate individual beings and their actions within larger theoretical settings, called principles. They search for the defining principles that guide our actions, and for general descriptions that will explain the way things are and what they mean. This effort is to help us both understand ourselves better and act better.

As philosophers have considered human experience, three fundamental areas have been elicited:

How and what we know, think or understand ------> theory

What we create, produce or make -------> arts

How we act, what we do or should do -------> practice

The third strand will be the focus of our exploration in this seminar: How should we act? What should we be, or become? This debate is known as “moral theory” or ethics.

As the semester moves along, we will narrow our focus by asking these precise questions in the context of the business world: how ought we to act; what kind of person should we be as we fulfill our roles as managers, employers, employees and what is the nature of a corporation as a moral entity. The goals of this course include the following:

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