PHIL-105.
Admission to the Honors Program (see details on the Program).
Para qué te prepara
The Honors Program at Saint Louis University offers eligible students the opportunity to develop an individual course of study that complements his or her undergraduate major. The program offers unique and challenging courses and helps students to build the foundation for life long learning.
Dirigido a
Philosophy Requirement for A&S, Business, Engineering and Nursing; Honors Credit Available for Eligible Students.
There are many ways to solve problems, but only some of them are rational.
How do you tell the difference? How do you solve problems in a rational way?
The answer depends very much on the problem at hand, of course, but the striking thing about all these answers is that they have certain general features in common.
Whether the problem is economic, architectural, medical, or ethical, you clarify the ends to be achieved, seek out the various possible means for achieving them, and try to choose the best means relative to criteria to be introduced in this course.
The ability to do these things well in one field, I suggest, tends to carry over into others.
For example, people who are good at solving engineering problems already have the general tools for finding good solutions to ethical problems (whether they use them or not is of course another matter).
All this suggests two objectives for taking these problem solving procedures and applying them, as we will be doing in this course, to ethical problems.
The primary objective is to improve our chances for coping rationally with the real world of ethical problems.
Secondly, if greater rationality in one field can indeed be carried over into others, we can also hope to improve our chances for coping rationally with any problem whatsoever.
II. Course Description:
Equivalent to PHIL-205.
In most fields, there are two mental mistakes that have to be avoided at the same time. The first, described in idiomatic English, is not being able to see the forest for the trees—that is, the loss of an overall point of view due to an obsession with detail. The second is not being able to see the trees for the forest—the loss of contact with reality as a result of a steady diet of generalities. To help us avoid the first mistake, we will be studying the ethical principles of seven well known philosophers, from Aristotle to Frankena, a contemporary American. To help us avoid the second, we will see how and how well the principles of each apply to specific cases.
In the course of talking about these philosophers, we will introduce some basic tools for decision making. Some of these tools are for ethical problems alone. But some are for any problem, ethical or not; logic, for example, provides us with a clear criterion for sound argumentation, and applied mathematics gives us decision theory. How useful these tools can be is not sufficiently known. While they are not panaceas, they can be of great help in solving our ethical and non-ethical problems alike.
The philosophers we will be studying, along with the ethical principles (P) and case studies (C) that we will focus on are:
Aristotle.
P: the excellences of thought and desire
C: Cicero's corn merchant
Aquinas.
P: the natural law
C: Caesar's German thieves
Hobbes.
P: the road to peace
C: the prisoner's dilemma
Kant.
P: the categorical imperative
C: Kant's four cases
Bentham and Mill.
P: the principle of utility
C: the Milgram experiments
Frankena.
P: justice and beneficence
C: United States v. Holmes
III. Text and Other Course Materials:
The text is Moral Philosophy: A Reader, 3rd edition, edited by Louis Pojman. It is required and available in the bookstore.
IV. Required Reading
The following readings are from Pojman:
Aristotle: pp. 249-259
MacIntyre: pp. 271-286
Aquinas: pp. 21-32
Pojman: pp. 38-52
Hobbes: pp. 62-71
Kant: pp. 194-213
Bentham: pp. 113-115
Mill: pp. 141-146
Williams: pp. 168-178
Frankena: pp. 239-246
V. Requisites:
Acceptance into the program is determined by previous academic performance, achievement in college entrance examinations, and evidence of interest in the program.
A student who demonstrates academic ability and/or develops an interest in the Honors Program during his or her first year of study may also be admitted.
