PER6055 - Metaethics

Objectives:

Assessment tasks are designed to enable students to demonstrate the Learning and Employability outcomes for the relevant level of study. Level Learning Outcomes are embedded in the assessment task(s) at that level. This enables a more integrated view of overall student performance at each level.

Content:

Metaethics is the study of ethics itself. Rather than trying to determine what is and isn’t good, for example, it attempts to understand the nature of goodness itself. It examines the nature of our moral judgements, rather than judging whether an action is good, it examines the nature of the judgement itself. This modulewill expand your learning in PER4013 Ethical Foundations, providing you with the opportunity to study metaethics in greater detail. The module will introduce you to some of the high-level debates in metaethics allowing you to engage with the state of the art.Potential topics will include questions such as, is morality objective, subjective, or relative? Are moral properties natural, supernatural, or non-natural properties? Is the open question argument successful? Is Hume’s guillotine a good criticism of traditional ethical systems? Are our moral judgements cognitive or non-cognitive? Is morality real? Your assessment will allow you to explore one of these questions in particular detail.

At the end of this module, you will be able to engage with the absolute state of the art in philosophy. Thus, you will be becoming philosophers in your own right, rather than students. This means it will be a challenging, but also immensely rewarding module.

More generally, you will gain critical thinking skills, the ability to write in a professional manner, the ability to discuss complex ideas with others, and much more besides!

Learning and Teaching Information:

Student-led enquiry and discussion will be used as a teaching method to get students engaged in ‘deep learning’ regarding issues pertaining to metaethics. High-level academic issues will be discussed and debated in class with a view to preparing students for meeting the assessment and the level learning outcomes.

You will be taught using LTU’s multimodal approach to teaching. Your learning will be divided into three stages:

Preparation: You will be given clear tasks to support you in preparing for live, in-person teaching. This may include watching a short, pre-recorded lecture (or other open educational resource), reading a paper or text chapter, finding resources to discuss with your peers in class, reading and commenting on a paper or preparing other material for use in class. Your Module Tutor will give you information to help you understand why you are completing an activity and how this will be built on during live, in-person teaching.

Live: All your live, in-person teaching will be designed around active learning, providing you with valuable opportunities to build on preparation tasks and interact with staff and peers, as well as helping you to deepen your understanding, apply knowledge and surface any misunderstandings.

Post: Follow-up activities will include clear opportunities for you to check understanding and apply your learning to a new situation or context. These activities will also be a source of feedback for staff that will inform subsequent sessions.

Lectures
Hours: 12
Intended Group Size: 30

Seminars
Hours: 12
Intended Group Size: 30

Guided independent study
Hours: 126

Further details relating to assessment
Students can negotiate their assessment topics in line with the Level Learning Outcomes and under the guidance of the module tutor.

Assessment:

001 Essay; 2,500 words; Semester 2 100%

Fact File

Module Coordinator - Richard Playford
Level - 6
Credit Value - 15
Pre-Requisites - NONE
Semester(s) Offered - 6S2

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