128. Practical Ethics

This topic will better enable you to reason independently, critically, and rigorously about practical moral issues such as war, the treatment of animals, obligations to future generations, punishment, abortion, euthanasia, charitable giving, commodification of bodies and bodily organs, disability, racial and gender equality, and so on. You will be encouraged to consider the ways in which views about these issues can depend on questions in other areas of philosophy. Relevant questions in normative ethics include whether there is a moral asymmetry between doing harm and allowing harm to occur, whether an agent's intention is relevant to the permissibility of her action, and whether, and if so in what ways, the badness of death is relevant to the wrongness of killing. Relevant issues in metaphysics include when we begin to exist and how the misfortune of death might vary at different ages. Some issues in practical ethics depend on the analysis of concepts, such as species, race, and sex or gender, that are elucidated in the philosophy of biology. You will also be encouraged to find links among the practical issues themselves - for example, the way that war, self-defence, and punishment raise related questions about responsibility, desert, and liability, while other issues are connected through their raising similar questions about moral status, the limits of obligation, and the morality of causing individuals to exist.