Ethics and Policymaking

Catalog description

Nearly every question of policy is also a question of ethics. Whether the matter at hand is public policy or institutional policy, anyone faced with deciding how to manage a budget, prioritize certain projects, or distribute opportunities, goods, or services must contend with competing values and tradeoffs between options. In this course, students will explore several important ethical frameworks and apply them to real-life policy problems. Moreover, the course will emphasize a deliberative methodology for ethical problem solving; students will learn and employ deliberative democratic methods of respectful and collaborative discourse as a vehicle for ethical policy analysis. Satisfies the Political Theory Sub-Field Requirement for the Political Science Major. Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought Ways of Knowing requirement.