PHI2603: Ethics in Contemporary Society

Course Description

PHI2603 Ethics in Contemporary Society is the general-education ethics course — an introduction to the major moral theories and their application to the arguments people actually have about how to live and what a society owes its members.

The course is offered at approximately four Florida institutions, including Florida State College at Jacksonville, the University of Central Florida and the University of West Florida.

The University of West Florida places it in the College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Department of History and Philosophy at 3 semester hours, exploring "the fundamental problems of Western ethics, the classical and Judeo-Christian traditions, modern ideals of the good for the individual business, politics and the environment within the Western Canon." It meets the General Education requirement in Humanities.

Florida State College at Jacksonville titles it Introduction to Applied Ethics at 3 credits: "a practical overview of key issues, questions, and concepts in applied ethics," with emphasis on "the historical development of ethical thinking, a variety of ethical approaches and on multicultural aspects of ethics," in which students "examine a variety of personal, social, and professional ethical issues and problems and learn methods of resolving them through the use of critical thinking skills, sound ethical reasoning and legal and professional codes."

⚠⚠ FSCJ additionally records that the course fulfils the Gordon Rule writing requirement and must be completed with a grade of C or higher. That is a Florida statewide rule with real transfer consequences, and it is the most practically important thing on this page — see Special Information.

⚠ The two descriptions differ in scope in a way worth noticing. UWF's is explicitly framed "within the Western Canon"; FSCJ's explicitly includes "multicultural aspects of ethics." Both are legitimate designs for an introductory ethics course, but they are not identical, and a student expecting comparative or non-Western material may or may not find it. Check the syllabus.

What the course actually teaches, and the thing students most often misunderstand about it. An ethics course is not an exercise in being told what is right, and it is not an exercise in concluding that everything is a matter of opinion. It is training in a specific skill: making the reasons behind a moral judgement explicit, and then testing whether they hold up. Most people hold moral views they have never had to defend, and the course's method is to find where those views conflict with each other and force a resolution.

The three major frameworks are the course's spine, and each is genuinely powerful and genuinely incomplete.

• Consequentialism, usually in its utilitarian form: an act is right if it produces the best outcomes. Clear, egalitarian, and it explains a great deal of practical policy reasoning. ⚠ It also implies that a sufficiently good outcome justifies almost anything, which is the objection it has never fully answered.
• Deontology, usually Kantian: some acts are wrong regardless of consequences, because persons must be treated as ends and never merely as means. It captures the intuition that rights are not negotiable against aggregate benefit. ⚠ It also generates conflicts between duties that it struggles to adjudicate.
• Virtue ethics, from Aristotle: the question is not "what should I do?" but "what sort of person should I be?" It fits moral life as people actually experience it. ⚠ It gives less guidance in a hard case than the other two.

⚠ The most valuable outcome is realising that the frameworks disagree in predictable ways, and that identifying which framework a disputant is using explains most public moral disagreement. A great deal of argument is people applying different frameworks to the same case without noticing.

Relativism gets addressed early because students arrive holding it. The observation that moral codes differ across societies is true; the inference that no moral claim can be criticised across societies does not follow from it, and the course examines why. ⚠ The standard move — pointing out that a consistent relativist cannot condemn any practice in any other culture, including ones they in fact condemn — is uncomfortable and productive, and it is not an argument for the opposite extreme either.

The applied half is where the course earns its place in general education. Depending on the section: business ethics, medical ethics, environmental ethics, war and violence, punishment, animals, technology and privacy, and questions of distributive justice. ⚠ UWF's description names business, politics and the environment specifically; FSCJ's names professional codes, which points at practical application in a working context.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Distinguish ethics from law, religion, custom and personal preference, and explain how each relates to moral judgement without being identical to it.
• Distinguish descriptive, normative and metaethical claims.
• Reconstruct a moral argument in standard form and identify its premises, including unstated ones.
• Explain and evaluate ethical relativism and subjectivism, including what does and does not follow from cultural variation.
• Explain and apply consequentialism and utilitarianism — act and rule versions, the principle of utility, and the standard objections.
• Explain and apply Kantian deontology — the categorical imperative, universalisability, treating persons as ends.
• Explain and apply virtue ethics — character, the virtues, practical wisdom, the mean.
• Explain social contract theory and rights-based approaches.
• Explain natural law and the classical and Judeo-Christian traditions in ethics.
• Explain egoism and evaluate psychological and ethical versions of it.
• Apply competing frameworks to a concrete moral problem and explain where and why they diverge.
• Analyse moral dilemmas in which every available option violates some principle.
• Evaluate arguments about justice and distribution.
• Analyse at least several applied topics — business, medicine, environment, technology, punishment, war — as the section covers them.
• Explain the role of professional codes of ethics and their relationship to general moral theory.
• Recognise common failures in moral reasoning — appeals to nature, ad populum, false dilemma, slippery slope, moral licensing.
• Write a reasoned argumentative essay that states a position, supports it, considers a serious objection and responds.
• Discuss contested moral questions with people who disagree, in terms of reasons rather than assertion.

Optional Outcomes

• Analyse care ethics and feminist approaches to moral theory.
• Analyse non-Western ethical traditions — Confucian, Buddhist, Islamic, African — where the course includes them.
• Analyse environmental ethics in depth — anthropocentrism, animal moral status, obligations to future generations.
• Analyse bioethics — autonomy, informed consent, end-of-life decisions, resource allocation.
• Analyse business ethics — corporate responsibility, whistleblowing, conflicts of interest.
• Analyse technology and data ethics — privacy, surveillance, algorithmic decision-making.
• Analyse punishment and criminal justice ethics.
• Analyse the ethics of war and political violence.
• Analyse moral psychology — the empirical study of how moral judgements are actually formed.
• Analyse free will and moral responsibility.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• What ethics is — its scope, and its relation to law, religion and custom.
• Moral reasoning — argument structure, principles, cases, consistency.
• Relativism and subjectivism.
• Egoism.
• Consequentialism and utilitarianism — Bentham, Mill.
• Deontology — Kant, duty, rights.
• Virtue ethics — Aristotle, character, practical wisdom.
• Social contract and rights theory.
• Natural law and the classical and religious traditions.
• Justice and distribution.
• Applied topics — as covered by the section.
• Professional codes and applied decision procedures.
• Argumentative writing on a moral question.

Optional Topics

• Care ethics and feminist ethics.
• Non-Western ethical traditions.
• Environmental ethics and animal moral status.
• Bioethics and medical ethics.
• Business and organisational ethics.
• Technology, data and AI ethics.
• Punishment and criminal justice.
• War, terrorism and political violence.
• Moral psychology and empirical ethics.
• Free will and responsibility.

Resources & Tools

• Standard textbooks: Rachels and Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy — by a distance the most widely adopted introductory ethics text, short, clear and excellent; Shafer-Landau, The Fundamentals of Ethics and its companion reader The Ethical Life; Vaughn, Doing Ethics, which is strong on applied cases; MacKinnon and Fiala, Ethics: Theory and Contemporary Issues.
• Primary readings commonly assigned in selection: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics; Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals; Mill, Utilitarianism; Hobbes, Leviathan; and classic applied articles — Singer on famine relief, Thomson on abortion, Hardin on the commons, Friedman on corporate responsibility.
• Free references: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (plato.stanford.edu) — free and peer-reviewed, and its entries on consequentialism, Kant's moral philosophy and virtue ethics are standard; the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, pitched slightly more accessibly; and the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara (scu.edu/ethics), whose decision-making framework and case studies are free and genuinely well made.
• Professional codes worth reading directly, since FSCJ's description names them: the AMA and ANA codes in health care, the ACM and IEEE codes in computing, the AICPA and IMA codes in accounting, the PRSA code in communication, the ABA Model Rules in law, and the NASW code in social work. ⚠ Reading the code for the profession you are heading into is one of the more useful hours available in this course.
• No software or equipment. The materials are texts, cases and argument.
• ⚠ A practical note on the writing. Where this course carries the Gordon Rule designation, the writing requirement is real and the essays are graded on argument. Your institution's writing centre is free and included in fees already paid, and this is exactly the kind of course it exists for.

Career Pathways

This is a general-education course rather than a career preparation course, and it would be dishonest to present it otherwise. Its value is that the skill it teaches — making reasons explicit and testing them — is used in every profession that has to justify decisions to other people.

• Any licensed profession. ⚠ Medicine, nursing, law, accounting, engineering, social work, teaching, counselling and public administration all have enforceable codes of ethics, and violations carry licensure consequences. This course is where the reasoning behind those codes is taught.
• Health professions (SOC 29-xxxx) — bioethics is a required component of medical, nursing and allied health education, and ethics questions appear on professional examinations.
• Law (SOC 23-1011) — ⚠ philosophy majors post among the highest mean LSAT scores of any major, and professional responsibility is a required bar subject (the MPRE).
• Business, accounting and finance (SOC 13-2011, 11-xxxx) — ethics is a required component of accounting curricula and of the CPA and CMA credentials.
• Public administration and policy (SOC 19-3094, 11-1021) — Florida has a Commission on Ethics and a body of public officer ethics law, and government employees receive required ethics training.
• Compliance, risk and corporate ethics roles (SOC 13-1041) — a real and growing function.
• Technology (SOC 15-1252, 15-1212) — ⚠ AI governance, data privacy and research ethics roles increasingly recruit people who can reason about concepts rather than only implement systems.
• Journalism and communication (SOC 27-3023, 27-3031).
• Teaching (SOC 25-2031) — Florida educators are subject to the Principles of Professional Conduct, which is enforceable against certification.
• Further philosophy study — this course is the usual entry point to the philosophy major.

Special Information

⚠⚠⚠ The Gordon Rule — the most important practical fact on this page

FSCJ records that this course fulfils the Gordon Rule writing requirement and must be completed with a grade of C or higher, pursuant to State Board of Education Rule 6A-10.030.

The Gordon Rule is a Florida statewide requirement and it catches students out regularly, so it is worth stating plainly:

• It requires students to complete designated coursework involving substantial writing, plus designated mathematics coursework, as a condition of receiving an associate or baccalaureate degree from a Florida public institution.
• ⚠⚠ A grade of C or higher is required in a Gordon Rule course for it to count. A C− does not satisfy it at most institutions. This is stricter than the ordinary passing standard, and students who pass a course but fall below C discover they must retake it.
• ⚠ The designation is made by the institution, not by the course number. A course that carries Gordon Rule credit at one Florida institution may not at another, and the same number can be designated at one and not the other.
• ⚠ Gordon Rule status normally transfers with the course within the Florida public system when the course was designated at the sending institution — but confirm it rather than assuming, particularly if you are transferring from a private or out-of-state institution.

What to do: check whether your institution designates this course for Gordon Rule credit; if it does, treat a C as the minimum acceptable grade, not a pass; and if you are transferring, verify how the receiving institution records it. Your advisor can confirm all three in one conversation, and it is worth having early.

This is the first guide in this repository to document the Gordon Rule; it applies to many general-education courses and to the composition and mathematics sequences.

⚠ Scope divergence — Western canon or comparative?

	UWF	FSCJ
Title	Ethics in Contemporary Society (= statewide)	Introduction to Applied Ethics
Scope	fundamental problems of Western ethics; classical and Judeo-Christian traditions; "within the Western Canon"	applied ethics; historical development; "multicultural aspects of ethics"; professional codes
Emphasis	theory, applied to business, politics and environment	practical resolution of personal, social and professional problems

The number is PHI2603 and the credit articulates cleanly. Both cover the major frameworks and both apply them. ⚠ But the difference is real: UWF's framing is explicitly canonical and Western; FSCJ's explicitly includes comparative material and leans harder toward applied and professional cases. If a receiving programme or a personal interest requires non-Western ethical traditions, check the syllabus rather than the number.

General education and transfer

PHI2603 is a 2000-level lower-division course and is widely taught at Florida College System institutions — which makes it one of the courses most likely to be taken before transfer, and one of the most reliably transferable.

• UWF records it as meeting the General Education requirement in Humanities. ⚠ General-education category designations are institution-specific, and while Florida's common general-education core provides substantial protection, confirm the category at your receiving institution — a course can transfer as credit without satisfying the category you expected.
• Florida's statewide articulation for A.A. graduates is strong: a student completing an A.A. at a Florida College System institution transfers with general education satisfied. ⚠ Taking general-education courses at a state college before transfer is generally the cheapest route, and this course is a good candidate for it.
• ⚠ Some majors require a specific ethics course — professional ethics in nursing, engineering ethics, business ethics — and this general course does not always substitute. Check the major's requirement, not just the general-education list.

Prerequisites, format and workload

No prerequisite at either institution. This is a genuine entry point with no prior philosophy assumed.

3 credits, 45 contact hours — lecture and discussion, three hours per week; commonly offered online.

Expect 5–7 hours per week outside class — moderate by upper-division standards, but ⚠ where the course carries the Gordon Rule designation the writing load is higher, because the designation requires substantial written work.

⚠ The essays are graded on argument, not on position. This is the single most common misunderstanding in the course. You will not lose marks for a conclusion your instructor disagrees with; you will lose marks for asserting a conclusion without engaging the strongest objection to it. A well-argued essay defending a position the instructor rejects outscores a poorly argued one they share.

⚠ Discussing contested moral questions

This course deals with abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia, war, economic justice and similar questions, and students hold sincere and opposed views on them.

• The classroom standard is reasons, not conclusions. The question is always what supports a position and whether it survives objection.
• You will be asked to state the strongest case for views you reject. That is a core philosophical skill and is assessed as one; it is not a request that you change your mind.
• Nobody is required to disclose personal experience, and some of these topics touch personal experience closely.
• Disagreement is expected and is the point. A section where everyone agrees is a section learning very little.
• ⚠ If specific material is personally difficult, raising it with the instructor is reasonable and normal. Your institution's counselling centre is confidential and normally covered by fees already paid; 988 (call or text) is free 24/7.

Related numbers

⚠ PHI2010 is the general introduction to philosophy; PHI3130 logic (⚠ see that guide — it carries a symbolic version and a critical-reasoning version at different institutions); PHI3670 ethical theory at the upper division; PHI3626/PHI3633 and similar for medical and business ethics; PHM for social and political philosophy. An upper-division ethical theory course is a different, more demanding course and does not substitute in the other direction.

AI Integration

⚠ Ethics is now one of the courses where AI is unavoidably part of the subject matter, and the applied section of a well-taught version will say so.

As subject matter. The technology has made several of the course's abstract problems concrete and urgent:

• Responsibility and the attribution gap. When an automated system causes harm, who is responsible — the developer, the deployer, the user, the person who chose the training data? ⚠ The course's material on moral responsibility, intention and negligence applies directly, and it does not resolve the question cleanly, which is what makes it good teaching material.
• Fairness and distribution. A system trained on historical data reproduces historical patterns. Whether that is unjust, and what would count as fixing it, is a question about distributive justice — and the competing answers in the course generate genuinely different technical requirements.
• Privacy and autonomy. Surveillance, inference from data people did not knowingly provide, and persuasive systems that shape choices raise exactly the Kantian question about treating persons as means.
• Consequentialist framings and their limits. Optimising a system for an aggregate outcome is consequentialist reasoning implemented in software, and it inherits consequentialism's known objection: the individual whose interests are traded away has a complaint the arithmetic does not register.
• Professional codes are adapting. The ACM and IEEE codes now address these questions directly, and reading them is a good bridge between theory and practice.

Using AI tools for coursework. Models are competent at explaining a framework, at generating objections to a position you have drafted — genuinely useful, since objection-and-reply is the hardest part of the essay — and at summarising a debate before you read the actual arguments.

⚠ Where they fail, and one failure is specific to this subject.

Models are trained to produce balanced, inoffensive output on contested moral questions — which means asked what is right, they will typically survey positions without committing. ⚠ That is precisely the essay that scores badly in this course. The assignment asks you to take a position and defend it against the strongest objection; a model's characteristic output is the fence-sitting summary the grading criteria are written against.

They also fabricate citations and misattribute positions — assigning an argument to Kant that belongs to Ross, or inventing a Singer paper — and they flatten the disagreement where the disagreement is the assignment.

The deeper point, and it is not a scolding. The reason to work through Kant's argument yourself rather than read a summary is that the course's product is a capacity, not a body of information: the ability to notice, in a real situation with real stakes, that a decision rests on a principle you have not examined — and to examine it. You will use that in a hospital, a firm, a classroom or a courtroom, without a tool and without time. It is built by argument and by nothing else.

Academic integrity. Read the syllabus; policies vary. Submitting generated prose as your own violates every Florida institution's policy. ⚠ There is an obvious and worth-stating irony in outsourcing an ethics essay, and instructors do note it — but the practical point is stronger than the ironic one: the essay is the exercise, and skipping it leaves you with the grade and none of the capacity.