Philosophy 2

This course will be a broad introduction to some of the important issues in moral and political philosophy. We will address central questions in each of the three major subject areas of ethics. We will start with metaethics, and ask questions about the nature of morality. For example: Is there any such thing as moral truth, or are all moral statements only personally or culturally relative? Then we will discuss questions in normative ethics about the content of morality: What makes right actions right? How do our various duties relate to one another (for example, is there only one supreme duty, from which all the others can be derived)?  Finally, we will address some of the more explicitly practical questions in applied ethics. For example: What are our duties to those suffering from famine in far-off lands? Is abortion ever morally permissible? How should we treat non-human animals; for example, can we permissibly eat them?