May 28, 2024  
2023-2024 Undergraduate Catalog 
    
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2023-2024 Undergraduate Catalog
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PHIL 3380 - Ethics: Morality, Self-Interest, and Justice

Credits: 3

Explores issues in normative ethical and political theory, with a particular focus on morality, self-interest, and justice. Topics may include: What is the nature of human well-being or self-interest? Does it consist in pleasure and freedom from pain? Does it consist in the satisfaction of informed desires or preferences? Or are there objective constituents of well-being, like achievement, loving relationships, or meaningful knowledge? How is morality related to human interests? Can morally right actions be identified with actions that have maximally beneficial consequences? Can morality be identified with the rules that it would be in everyone’s interests to agree to live by? What is the relationship between justice and self-interest? Is justice merely a constraint on the pursuit of self-interest? Can the principles of justice for social institutions be identified with the principles that free and rational persons concerned to further their own interests would accept in a hypothetical situation of equal liberty?


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