Meat, Markets, Medicine, and Other Moral Issues

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course introduces students to important concepts, issues, and debates in applied ethics. It begins with a brief overview of normative ethics, familiarizing students with two major approaches in this area: consequentialism and deontology. The remainder of the course tackles real-world issues, and proceeds in four parts. PART I: We engage with questions concerning our duties to non-human animals, as well as related questions concerning their moral status. Do non-human animals have moral rights? Do they matter less from the moral point of view than human beings? We’ll also be engaging with some important questions about the ethics of eating meat. PART II: We consider the moral challenges raised by certain kinds of markets, including commercial surrogacy, sweatshops, and the black market in human organs. On the one hand, these practices seem objectionably exploitative. On the other hand, we might think that these individuals’ choices—to sell their organs, rent out their wombs, or undertake risky labor—should be respected. PART III: We investigate ongoing controversies in the ethics of medicine. One such controversy concerns the shape that a state’s organ donation system ought to take: should such systems be ‘opt-in’, or ‘opt-out’? Another important issue is how we ought to conceive of disabilities: are disabilities neutral differences—as opposed to good or bad ones? We’ll also look into related controversies surrounding human enhancement and genetic engineering. Finally, we’ll explore the ethics of voluntary Euthanasia. PART IV: The course concludes by examining matters of justice. Among these are matters of global justice raised by widespread poverty; what duties do those of us living in affluent countries have to the global poor, and why? Another such issue is justice in the distribution of educational opportunities. Does justice require that all children receive the same quality education? Or does it simply require that all children receive a good enough education?