Blackburn, Simon Ethics: A Very Short Introduction, OUP, 2003
Harris, J. The Value of Life, Routledge, 1985
Norman, Richard The Moral Philosophers, OUP, 2nd ed. 1998
Rachels, James The Elements of Moral Philosophy, McGraw-Hill, 3rd Ed, 1998
Regan, T. (ed) Matters of Life and Death: Essays in Moral Philosophy, McGraw Hill, 1993
Singer, P. Practical Ethics, Cambridge University Press, 1993
Singer, P. (ed) Applied Ethics, Oxford University Press, 1986
Singer, Peter (ed) A Companion to Ethics, Blackwells, 1993
Frey, R G & Wellman, C H (eds) A Companion to Applied Ethics, Blackwell, 2003
LaFollette, Hugh (ed) The Oxford Handbook of Practical Ethics,OUP, 2003

Library, IT facilities, and space for individual and group study

A weekly lecture will be used to introduce issues, survey competing positions, outline possible solutions and to set up an associated student-centred small group discussion session. The latter will consist of student-led debates on pre-arranged questions, role-playing sessions, and culminate in individual presentations to seminar groups of particular positions.

The module forms an introduction to a range of ethical issues raised within the specific area of applied ethics. Students will be introduced to questions about what is distinctive in thinking about moral issues, and the principles that can be appealed to in justifying the treatment of other people. Emphasis would be placed on learning how to approach, grasp, represent, and critically analyse specifically philosophical arguments and viewpoints found in a variety of classic and contemporary texts. The exact teaching programme would be determined by the tutor delivering the module, but would be likely to include such varied topics as: suicide and the end of life (Hume and Schopenhauer), euthanasia (James Rachels), abortion (Judith Jarvis Tomson), designing future people (John Harris), slavery (Aristotle and Hare), animal rights (Singer), censorship and pornography (Williams), war and moral responsibility (Nagel), publication and freedom of speech (Mill), or contrasting contemporary treatments of, for example, world poverty and duties to distant strangers, crime and punishment, equality and discrimination, the public interest and intrusion of individual privacy by the press, corporate responsibility and the environment, justice and the allocation of resources, and so forth.

A 1800 word critical analysis either of a specific moral problem or a popular presentation of moral reasoning [Learning Outcomes 1,2,3]
A 700 word transcript of a seminar presentation, amended to take into account subsequent discussion [Learning Outcomes 1,2,3,4]