Ethical Thought and Moral Values. The requirement in ethical thought and moral values is designed to engage students in disciplined reflection on human conduct, character, and ways of life. Through inquiry into questions of ethics and morality as presented in works from one or more cultural traditions, these courses will help students to discern, understand, and appreciate ethical issues and to articulate, assess, and defend moral judgments in an informed and thoughtful way. Source materials may include theoretical works in various disciplines, political deliberations, autobiographies, and utopian and dystopian novels, among others. Regardless of the particular genres and the traditions to which these works belong, courses in this area focus on the ethical thought and moral values that shape individual and collective life.
Every society draws distinctions between good and evil, right and wrong, noble and ignoble.
Courses in this category focus on ethical questions and moral deliberations, regardless of the historical, cultural, or religious context in which they occur. They are drawn largely, though not exclusively, from the Departments of Philosophy, Politics, and Religion. The aim of these courses is to help students explore and understand different value systems, to think about the possibility of commonalities across historical and cultural boundaries, and to introduce ways of making reasoned moral judgments. Historical analysis begins with the problem of understanding the differences between the world of contemporary experience and the worlds of the past. Some courses in historical analysis focus on the distinctiveness of one or another part of the past, with the intention of bringing students to an understanding of political, social, and cultural configurations quite different from their own.