Ethics Online Course | Ethical Theories, Human Rights & Applied Ethics

• Remote learning course | Start anytime and work at your own pace.
• Learn about ethics theories, determining ethical behaviour, metaethics, ethical positions, the social contract, virtues, morality, individual rights, ethical society, ethics in the workplace and more.
• 9 lessons + 9 assignments | Tutor support and feedback throughout the course | Written assignments | Practical exercises | Individual research.
• Useful for ethical behaviour and decision making across different situations, environments and industries.

Lesson Structure

There are 9 lessons in this course:

1. Overview and Introduction to Ethics
   • How did ethics emerge?
   • The relationship between ethics and philosophy
   • Divine Command Theory of Ethics
   • The Theory of Forms Theory of Ethics
   • Theory of Relative Ethics
   • Meta-ethics
   • Normative Ethics
   • Applied Ethics
   • Ethical theories and principals
   • How you apply ethics in real life?
2. Arguing an Ethical Position –An overview of Meta ethics
   • Metaethics
   • Moral Realism
   • Ethical Naturalism
   • Ethical Non-naturalism
   • Expressivism Theories (Non-Cognitive)
3. Accommodating different ideas
   • Ethical Relativism
   • Ethical Universalism
   • Absolutism
   • Pluralism
   • Virtue Ethics
   • Deontological Ethics
   • Natural Law
   • Social Contract
   • Utilitarianism
   • Care Ethics
   • Different Ethical Viewpoints
   • Conventionalist
   • Experientialist
   • Transcendentalist
   • Individualist
   • Systemicist
   • Legitimist
   • Ethical Dilemmas
4. Virtues and Morality
   • Developmental Model of Virtue Ethics
   • Principle of the Golden Mean
   • Other Theories
   • Problems
   • Morality
   • Religion
5. Reasons for Ethical Decisions
   • Theories of Ethical Decision-Making
   • Consequentialism
   • Utilitarianism
   • Natural Ethics Theory
   • Principle of Natural Law
   • Golden Rule
   • The Principle of Double Effect
6. The Social Contract
   • Theories of Social Contract
   • Hobbes
   • Locke
   • Rousseau
   • Twentieth Century Social Contract Theory
   • Rawls
   • Principle of Self-Interest
   • Egoism
7. An Individual’s Rights
   • Basic Human Rights
   • The Underpinning Values of Human Rights
   • Fairness
   • Respect
   • Equality
   • Dignity
   • Autonomy
   • Categories of Human Rights
   • Civil Rights
   • Political Rights
   • Economic Rights
   • Social Rights
   • Cultural Rights
   • Human Rights Breaches
   • Applied Ethics
   • Stem Cell Research
8. What is an Ethical Society?
   • Labelling and Mental Health
   • More on Stigmatization and Labelling
   • Ethics and Mental Health
9. The Ethics of Work and Business
   • Why Do Organisations Need Ethics?
   • Business Ethics
   • Ethics in Medicine
   • Benefits of Ethics in Healthcare
   • Ethics for a Consultant

Aims

• Understand the scope, nature and language of ethics
• Demonstrate a capacity to argue varying viewpoints about ethics
• Discuss how conflicting points of view might be rationalized in ethics
• Discuss the virtues found or lacking in different people and groups of people
• Identify how and why different people will choose to adopt one ethical position rather than another
• Explain the social contract
• Explain how ethics can be applied to determine and manage the rights of individuals
• Explain how ethics can be applied to better manage the effective functioning of human societies
• Explain how ethics can be applied by people in the work they do, on a daily basis and throughout an entire career

What is Your Ethical Position?

In the modern world, we may face many different moral decisions. Philosophers have considered different ways to rationalise conflicting viewpoints through ethical decisions.

 

Ethical Relativism is the idea that any position on ethics will have a relationship to the context in which that position exists (e.g. many people may believe that it would be unethical to eat certain things, or expose parts of the human body in one context; however, it may be acceptable to do the same things in a different place or time).

 

Ethical relativism is the view that all points of view have equal value and the individual will determine what is true and relative for them. So relativism argues that what is the truth varies from person to person and that different people will believe different things to be true.  Ethical relativism is the most common form of relativism, but relativism does exist in science and mathematics. So in relativist ethics, statements can include: 

• “What is right for me may not be right for you”.
• “What is right for your culture may not be right for my culture”.
• “No moral principles are true for all people, in all places, all of the time”.

So the argument here is that there are no moral absolutes, no moral wrong and no moral right.