Contemporary Moral Philosophy

The course will acquaint students with key debates in contemporary moral philosophy (major theories and authors). Students will get familiar with the main ethical concepts in contemporary moral philosophy and with their philosophical and historical development. Through readings of selected problems in ethics students will be acquainted with key thinkers and will know how to correlate different theoretical aspects of their discussions. They will understand ontological, epistemological and semantic problems that are inherent to ethical questions, and they will know how to compose them into a coherent whole.

Main topics:
- selected themes from contemporary moral philosophy: utilitarianism, the return of virtue ethics, moral psychology and intention, theory of justice, applied ethics and approaches to it, moral phenomenology
- main topics of moral theory: the structure of moral theory and basic ethical categories, metaethics, normative ethics, moral theory, moral realism/irrealism, naturalism and non-naturalism, emotivism, prescriptivism, intuitionism, motivational internalism and externalism, subjectivism, relativism, error theory.
- the structure of moral thought: normative moral theory, deontological ethics and teleological justification of ethics, contractualism, intuitionism, the ethics of moral care, moral pluralism, moral particularism.
- selected issues of moral theory: the relationship between moral reasons and moral principles, moral generalities, moral intuition.