Curriculum Map

Ethics & Moral Philosophy

You already have a moral philosophy — you just haven't examined it yet. That's dangerous. This course puts you in the room where the decision is being made and asks: what should we do, and who gets to decide?

17 Units

Early Units (Foundation)

Building Skills

Advanced Concepts

Capstone/Synthesis

The Runaway Trolley and the Surgeon's Dilemma

Most people would pull a lever to divert a trolley from five people to one — but they would not push a large man off a footbridge to stop the same trolley. The arithmetic is identical. The intuitions are opposite. Philippa Foot invented the trolley problem in 1967 not as a parlor game but as proof that consequentialism fails to capture how people actually reason. This unit uses the trolley problem and its variants to introduce the three major ethical traditions and to interrogate whether moral intuitions can be trusted.

45-60 minutes

The Greatest Good: Bentham's Corpse and Mill's Liberty

Jeremy Bentham's preserved body still sits in a glass case at University College London. His philosophy — measure pleasure and pain, maximize the first, minimize the second — runs through cost-benefit analysis, healthcare rationing, and the effective altruism movement. His student Mill agreed with the framework but saw where it broke: it could justify oppressing minorities. This unit explores utilitarianism's extraordinary power and its most dangerous implications.

45-60 minutes

The Categorical Imperative: Kant's Absolute Rules

Immanuel Kant never left Königsberg. His neighbors set their clocks by his daily walk. From that tiny, obsessively ordered life came the most ambitious ethical system ever attempted: morality must be universal, unconditional, and derivable by reason alone. The categorical imperative: act only according to principles you could will to become universal laws. The problem: Kant says you must not lie, even to a murderer asking where your friend is hiding. This unit examines the categorical imperative, its extraordinary intellectual legacy, and where it seems to break.

45-60 minutes

Virtue, Character, and the Good Life

Aristotle didn't ask 'what should I do?' but 'what kind of person should I be?' Virtues — courage, temperance, justice, practical wisdom — are not rules to follow but dispositions to develop through practice. You become brave by doing brave things. Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue argues that modern ethics has failed because it ripped moral concepts out of the communities that gave them meaning. This unit examines virtue ethics as the oldest and, in some ways, most realistic of the three major ethical traditions.

45-60 minutes

Who Counts? Care Ethics and Moral Boundaries

Carol Gilligan's 1982 critique revealed that Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development were built by studying boys. When Gilligan studied girls, she found a different moral logic — not worse, different. An ethics of care, relationship, and responsibility. Then Peter Singer asked: if suffering is what matters morally, why does the boundary of moral consideration stop at humans? The effective altruism movement took Singer's logic global — and produced both genuine lives saved and, in Sam Bankman-Fried, a spectacular case study in what happens when consequentialist reasoning runs without moral brakes.

45-60 minutes

Your Data, Their Profit: The Ethics of Surveillance Capitalism

From the Cambridge Analytica scandal to China's social credit system, this unit investigates who owns your data, whether consent is real in the attention economy, and whether digital autonomy requires an entirely new category of rights. Shoshana Zuboff calls it the most significant economic shift of our era. Sandel asks whether you can consent to something you don't understand.

45-60 minutes

The Algorithm Is Not Neutral: AI, Bias, and Justice

COMPAS predicted recidivism and was twice as likely to falsely label Black defendants high-risk. ProPublica said the algorithm was biased. Northpointe said it was equally accurate for both groups. Both claims were mathematically true and mutually incompatible. Chouldechova's impossibility theorem proves that fair AI is not a technical problem engineers can solve. It is a moral question: which kind of unfairness are you willing to accept?

45-60 minutes

Triage, Ventilators, and Who Lives

In Bergamo in March 2020, doctors ran out of ventilators and had to decide who would receive the one resource that might keep them alive. Some used utilitarian calculus: most life-years saved. Some used lottery: equal chance regardless of age. Each framework saved different people and condemned others. This unit examines the ethics of medical rationing — from Napoleon's battlefield surgeons to COVID ICUs — and refuses to tell you which framework is right.

45-60 minutes

What Money Can't Buy: Markets, Morals, and Human Dignity

When an Israeli daycare introduced fines for late pickups, late arrivals increased. When the fine was removed, lateness stayed high — the moral norm had been permanently eroded. This unit follows Michael Sandel's argument that we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society, and asks which goods — if any — should remain beyond the reach of price.

45-60 minutes

The Ethics of Eating

A single hamburger requires 660 gallons of water. The average American eats 222 pounds of meat per year. Factory farms confine 99% of U.S. farm animals in conditions that would be illegal if applied to dogs. Jonathan Safran Foer: 'Not responding is a response.' This is applied ethics at its most personal: not an abstract debate about trolley tracks, but what you're having for dinner tonight.

45-60 minutes

Just War, Drones, and Distance

From Hiroshima to drone strikes in Yemen, this unit uses just war theory to examine how technology reshapes the ethics of violence. Students grapple with the moral distance created by modern warfare, the problem of complicity in weapons transfers, and the ultimate dilemma of nuclear deterrence.

2-3 weeks

Civil Disobedience — When Breaking the Law Is the Right Thing to Do

Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail is one of the most rigorous moral arguments ever written in English. This unit uses it as the centerpiece of an examination of civil disobedience — its history, its logic, its limits, and the uncomfortable symmetric argument problem: if your principles justify breaking unjust laws, they may equally justify your opponents doing the same.

2-3 weeks

Moral Relativism vs. Universal Rights

Female genital cutting is practiced by 200 million women alive today. Is opposing it cultural imperialism, or is there a floor of human rights below which no culture may go? This unit uses this hard case — and others including honor killings, caste discrimination, and child marriage — to examine moral relativism, the negotiation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Appiah's cosmopolitanism as a middle path.

2-3 weeks

Moral Psychology — Why You're Not as Good as You Think

Jonathan Haidt's research shows that moral reasoning usually happens *after* moral judgment — we decide first and justify second. This unit examines the psychology beneath your moral intuitions: the six moral foundations, Greene's trolley problem neuroscience, Sapolsky's biological account of moral behavior, and what it means to take these findings seriously without collapsing into moral nihilism.

2-3 weeks

Living Ethically — From Theory to Practice

This course has equipped you with the philosophical frameworks. This unit asks what you are supposed to do with them. From Parfit's account of personal identity to the effective altruism movement's rise and catastrophic fall, this unit moves from theory to practice — and finds that the gap between knowing what is right and doing it is itself one of the oldest moral problems there is.

2-3 weeks

Case Study: The Genetic Wild West — When DNA Becomes a Corporate Asset

When a bankruptcy judge rules that 15 million people's genetic data is a transferable corporate asset — when the same DNA technology that frees the innocent entraps entire communities — Lessig, Luhmann, Santos, Rampton and Stauber reveal how architecture, manufactured trust, and institutional blindness govern the most intimate data we possess.

5-7 days

Case Study: What Ten Days Reveal — War Crimes, Norms Erosion, and the Rules After the Rules Are Gone

Part 4 of the Bayesian sequence. What are war crimes? Who defined them? Why has the US spent 25 years ensuring they don't apply to Americans? Aaron Sorkin dramatized these dilemmas in 2001. The distance between that show and this war — 3,000 targets, 165 dead schoolgirls, a sanctioned ICC, a 47-53 Senate vote — is the measure of the norms we've lost. The Rome Statute, Meadows' policy resistance, Snyder's institutional collapse, and the Overton window from Fukuyama to Project 2025.

5-7 days

Learning Progression

This course is designed to be taken sequentially. Earlier units establish foundational concepts that later units build upon. While you can explore units in any order, following the numbered sequence provides the most coherent learning experience.