Lesson 12 was the last lesson of the semester. The students in the class bought me a Jesus soft toy, because they wanted to inspire me to become a great ethicist like Jesus. I thought that was really sweet of them! Although I do think that the soft toy kind of looks like Einstein, don’t [...]
A wise man once said to me, “People don’t do what you expect. People do what you inspect.”
This saying is relevant to the topic of discussion for Lesson 11– the ethics of privacy.
One of the readings dealt with the issue of companies monitoring their employees’ e-mails. How ethical/unethical you think this practice is depends largely [...]
I learned many things about abortion in this class on the ethics of reproduction.
For one, I learned that many Christians believe that abortion is not morally wrong. (Before this class, I’d never heard a Christian say that abortion is completely okay!) And they have Bible verses to back up their beliefs. For example, Numbers 3:15-16 [...]
Today I was the star of the show. Well, kind of
The topic today was the ethics of romance, and I’m the only Duke male undergraduate in the class.
So the class decided that my views would be representative of the entire Duke male student population. Well… for anyone who knows me, I think you’ll [...]
Lesson 8 focused on the ethics of social equality, and we spent most of the class talking about affirmative action.
Before coming to Duke, I had never heard anyone use the term “affirmative action.” So for those of you who aren’t familiar with what it is, here’s the ever-dependable Wikipedia definition:
“The term affirmative action refers to policies [...]
Read the following questions one by one and answer “yes” or “no” before moving to the next question. Just go with your gut response and don’t over-think it
1) Is it ever okay to torture another human being?
2) You have a terrorist in custody. There is a ticking time bomb that is going to [...]
This week’s lesson was on the ethics of war.
Having spent two years in the military, I felt especially excited about leading this week’s discussion.
The closest I’ve been to real combat is live-firing exercises or missions where we used blanks, and my only death-related experience was when one of my men committed suicide.
So I’ll be the first [...]
For this past week’s lesson, the faculty sponsor for the class, Betsy (she’s standing in front of me in the picture), had us over to her house for a potluck. We had our discussion on the ethics of globalization over dinner. I have to say that I really, really appreciated the home-cooked food! This is [...]
Lesson 4 was on the ethics of journalism.
When does investigative journalism serve the public good? Did we really need to know all the intimate details of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair? Why was Clinton’s affair so sensationalized by the media, but John F. Kennedy’s affair received far less media scrutiny?
Isn’t the role of journalism to serve the [...]
The topic of discussion for Lesson 3 was business ethics.
I was expecting to hear a lot of grand, wise theories– especially from the senior citizens in the class–about how we ought to prevent turmoil in the financial markets and improve the working conditions in sweatshops and reduce the culture of greed in our society.
So I [...]