To what extent can we justify our moral judgments?
What is the difference between “morality” and “ethics”?
How can we examine ethics critically?
How does ethics manifest itself?
What criteria do people use to make decisions based on ethics?
How do we gain a personal sense of right and wrong and how do we justify it?
What are the roles of relativism and absolutism?
How do ethical systems develop and on what are they based (altruism, consequences, principles, etc.)?
What is the difference, if any, between moral values and customs or conventions?
To what extent do you think you can predict someone’s moral beliefs from a knowledge of their cultural background?
How do we determine which cultural practices we tolerate and which we seek to ban?
Does it make more sense to say people are basically good and corrupted by society, or that people are basically bad and must be kept in line by society?
Does society work best when individuals pursue their own best interests or is that a recipe for disaster?
To what extent can religious texts give us moral guidance on the use of genetic engineering and other technologies that were unheard of when such texts were written?
To what extent do you agree with Dostoevsky’s quote: “If God is dead, everything is permitted”?
What role do rules play in moral reasoning?
What is the relationship between pleasure and happiness? Can you have many pleasures and still be unhappy?
To what extent do you agree with the philosophy of “the ends justifying the means”?
To what extent can we be sure we have done the “right thing”?
How important is consistency in moral reasoning?
To what extent is our perception of things colored by values?
Is all language value-laden?
Is ethics more a matter of the heart or of the head?
Do moral truths exist in the same kind of way as mathematical truths?
Does History show that we have made moral progress?
To what extent should the arts have a moral function?
Are scientists morally responsible for how their discoveries are used?
How do ethical factors affect experiments in the human sciences?