A draft of my Moral Theory course

In a recent blog post I talked about a presentation by Paul Hibbits at the summer workshop of ETUG (Educational Technology User’s Group, in BC), where he talked about doing his course planning in the open. I said in that post that soon I would share a planning document for one of my courses. Well, it’s not so “soon” after that post, but it’s finally here. I’ve been out of town the past month, so work on this has been pretty sporadic.

I am teaching a second year moral theory course this Fall. It’s required for majors, and one thing that those of us who teach this course have agreed on is that we’d like students to have a decent sense of consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. Beyond that, the rest is up to us. We don’t get only philosophy majors, though; there is a significant number of people in this course who are just interested, or who have taken a course in philosophy and want to take another, etc.

I’ve got much of a draft of a planning document for this course, though I’m missing readings for Virtue Ethics (still gotta work on that part!). This is all still very much draft; it may change!

Here’s the document: http://is.gd/KyJcyM

I’ve made it open so that anyone with a link can comment, so please add comments on the document or below, in the comments section, if you have any.

You’ll notice that I tried very hard to make it so that students don’t have to buy (many) books, but I am asking them to buy one, Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. I would have liked it if all the readings could be open and free, but I don’t think we’re yet at that stage in philosophy. Some of them are, but some are behind journal paywalls.

I have a few female philosophers on there, but definitely need more, especially in the consequentialism/utilitarianism section.