The course on Ethics offered in the autumn is at a college level, so the work will be challenging and interesting. The text originally identified, Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, begins with the problem that the variety of moral beliefs, and the difficulty of finding objective reasons to prefer one over the other, invites the conclusion of relativism, that is, what is right and wrong depends on one’s culture and preferences and there is no universal standard. MacIntyre rejects that conclusion. To explore how to evaluate competing moral beliefs, he develops a strand of Western ethical theory that has its origins with Aristotle. One weakness of MacIntyre’s book, for the high school student, is that he assumes considerable knowledge about historical approaches to ethics. The problem he deals with, and the solution he proposes, makes more sense if the historical material is mastered first. I have been looking for a good text to present the historical material and have found it in Robin Lovin’s Introduction to Christian Ethics. That book will be added to the course listing. Now the course is well balanced. Roughly the first half will present the general topic of ethics and survey various approaches taken by Western thinkers since Socrates. The second half will focus on MacIntyre’s book. I hope this course will be worthy of study both for its inherent interest and for the way it provides an introduction to some important philosophers in the Western tradition. It will also be an opportunity to develop college-level writing skills.
