Journals: will be collected throughout the semester. In these, I will expect you to reflect critically on any current events that might be relevant to our subject matter, as well as your own views on topics in contemporary ethics.

Each entry should be between 200 and 1000 words.

In the journals you should explain your ethical opinion about any current topic, whether it is from your personal life or a topic being discussed by the media. For example, you could write about a disagreement you are having with someone in your home life, or you could write about Donald Trump's campaign style. In the journals I am mainly concerned with how thoughtfully you develop your own opinions. The topics you write about do not have to match the topics we are reading about in the text book, although as we progress through the class I would like you to use your new knowledge from the text book to help develop your opinions. Please use and refer to the text book, and even in subsequent journals, again, the main focus is on your own opinions. The hope is that you will be able to see how your ethical opinions have evolved by the time you reach the later journal entries. As long as I can tell you took some time to carefully develop an ethical opinion about a current topic, you will get full credit.

Current Subject:

Chapter Seventeen:

Political Violence: War, Terrorism, and Torture

Vaughn, Lewis. Doing Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues. W. W. Norton & Company, 2015, pp. 539-596.