PHI3670: Ethical Theory

Course Description

PHI3670 Ethical Theory is the systematic study of what makes actions right or wrong, what makes a life good, and what — if anything — grounds a moral claim.

The course is offered at approximately six Florida institutions, including Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida State University, the University of Central Florida, the University of North Florida and the University of West Florida.

The title varies and the variation is informative. Florida State University uses the statewide title Ethical Theory. Florida Gulf Coast University titles it Ethics in Theory and Practice and describes an in-depth exploration of a significant tradition (for example utilitarianism or virtue theory) or an important topic of debate (for example the nature of moral responsibility), in which students read classic and contemporary texts and apply core ideas from them to contemporary ethical problems; prerequisites are ENC 1101 and ENC 1102. The University of West Florida titles it simply Ethics, places it in the Department of History and Philosophy, and describes philosophical theories concerning the nature of the good, moral obligation, human excellence, and the application of ethical theory to problems of the individual in relation to society — noting that it meets the College-Level Communication Skills Requirement, which means a substantial assessed writing load.

What distinguishes this course from an applied ethics course is the level at which the question is asked. An applied course asks whether a particular practice is permissible. This course asks what would make anything permissible — what a moral theory is, what work it is supposed to do, and how competing theories are assessed when they disagree.

The subject divides into three levels, and keeping them apart is the first thing the course teaches. Normative ethics asks which actions are right and offers systematic answers — consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics. Metaethics asks what moral claims even are: whether they state facts, whether they can be true, what would make them true, and how anyone could know. Applied ethics takes the theories to concrete cases. Most courses under this number centre on normative ethics with substantial metaethics, and use applied problems as tests of the theories rather than as the subject in themselves.

The most common misconception students bring is that the course will settle the answers. It will not, and the reason is worth stating: the major theories are not weak arguments awaiting refutation — each captures something genuinely important about moral thinking and each generates conclusions that strike most people as unacceptable in some cases. That is the intellectual situation, and learning to work within it carefully is what the course develops.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Distinguish normative ethics, metaethics and applied ethics and identify which level a given question belongs to.
• Explain and evaluate consequentialism, including classical and contemporary utilitarianism, act and rule versions, and the principal objections.
• Explain and evaluate deontological ethics, including Kant's categorical imperative in its main formulations, and the principal objections.
• Explain and evaluate virtue ethics, including the Aristotelian account of character, practical wisdom and flourishing, and the principal objections.
• Explain social contract approaches and their relation to justice.
• Explain care ethics and the feminist critique of impartialist moral theory.
• Analyse central metaethical positions — moral realism, anti-realism, expressivism, error theory, relativism and constructivism — and the arguments for and against each.
• Explain the is/ought distinction and the naturalistic fallacy, and assess what each establishes.
• Analyse the role of moral intuitions in ethical argument and explain the method of reflective equilibrium.
• Explain the problem of moral motivation — internalism and externalism about reasons — and why it matters.
• Apply moral theories to concrete cases and show how the same case is analysed differently under each.
• Reconstruct a philosophical argument accurately and charitably, identify its premises, and evaluate its validity and soundness.
• Construct a written argument that states a thesis, addresses the strongest opposing view, and defends a conclusion.
• Read primary philosophical texts, historical and contemporary, and extract their arguments.

Optional Outcomes

• Analyse moral responsibility, blame, praise and moral luck.
• Assess the relationship between ethics and religion, including the Euthyphro problem and divine command theory.
• Evaluate the bearing of empirical moral psychology and experimental philosophy on normative claims.
• Analyse theories of well-being — hedonism, desire satisfaction and objective list accounts.
• Assess the moral status of non-human animals and of future generations.
• Examine a sustained applied problem in depth as a test case for the theories.
• Assess moral disagreement and what it shows about moral truth.
• Examine non-Western ethical traditions.
• Analyse the ethics of emerging technology as a live proving ground for the theories.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• What a moral theory is and what it is for. The three levels of ethical inquiry; what a normative theory is supposed to deliver — a decision procedure, a criterion of rightness, or an account of what matters, which are not the same thing; the criteria by which theories are assessed (internal consistency, fit with considered judgements, explanatory power, action-guidingness); why "it depends on your values" is a position requiring defence rather than a way of ending the conversation.
• Consequentialism. Bentham and Mill; the greatest happiness principle; Mill's higher and lower pleasures and whether the distinction survives scrutiny; act versus rule utilitarianism and whether rule utilitarianism collapses into act utilitarianism; preference and welfare consequentialism; the appeal — impartiality, a clear criterion, seriousness about outcomes; the objections — the demandingness objection, the separateness of persons, the problem of justice (the transplant surgeon, the framed innocent), the calculation problem, and the difficulty that consequentialism seems to leave no room for special obligations to those close to you.
• Deontology. Kant — the good will, duty versus inclination, hypothetical and categorical imperatives; the universal law formulation and the contradiction-in-conception and contradiction-in-will tests; the humanity formulation and treating persons as ends rather than merely as means, which most students find the most compelling thing in the course; the kingdom of ends; the objections — the rigorism problem and Kant's own answer on lying to the murderer at the door, conflicts of duty, and whether the universalisability test does the work claimed for it; Ross's prima facie duties as a pluralist alternative; agent-centred constraints and options; the doctrine of double effect.
• Virtue ethics. Aristotle — eudaimonia and why "happiness" is a poor translation, the function argument, virtue as a mean between extremes, moral and intellectual virtue, phronesis (practical wisdom), and habituation as the mechanism of moral development; the modern revival and Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy"; the shift from "what should I do?" to "what sort of person should I be?"; the appeal — moral psychology, character, the role of emotion, the recognition that ethics is not only about hard cases; the objections — the action-guidance problem, cultural relativity of the virtue list, circularity in defining virtue and the virtuous agent, and the situationist challenge from empirical psychology.
• Contractarian and contractualist theories. Hobbes and the problem of cooperation; Rawls, the original position and the veil of ignorance; Scanlon and what no one could reasonably reject; the appeal to justification owed to others; the objections concerning those outside the contracting group.
• Care ethics and the feminist critique. Gilligan and the different-voice thesis; Noddings and Held; the criticism that the major theories abstract away from relationship, dependency and particularity; care as a corrective and as a rival theory; the objection that care ethics risks endorsing existing gendered divisions of labour.
• Metaethics: what moral claims are. Cognitivism versus non-cognitivism — do moral statements express beliefs that can be true, or attitudes? Moral realism, naturalist and non-naturalist; Moore's open question argument and the naturalistic fallacy; Mackie's error theory and the arguments from queerness and from relativity; emotivism (Ayer, Stevenson) and the Frege-Geach problem that sinks the simple versions; expressivism and quasi-realism (Blackburn, Gibbard); constructivism; relativism and the standard objections to it, including that it makes moral reform unintelligible.
• Method in ethics. Hume's is/ought gap and what it does and does not establish; the role of moral intuitions as evidence, and whether they are evidence at all; reflective equilibrium as the standard method and its critics; thought experiments — the trolley problem and its descendants — and the debate over what they show; moral disagreement and whether its persistence tells against realism.
• Moral motivation and reasons. Internalism and externalism about moral motivation; the amoralist problem; Hume on reason as the slave of the passions versus Kantian rationalism; why the question matters practically — whether recognising an obligation is by itself any reason to act on it.
• Application as a test of theory. Working concrete problems through each framework and seeing where they converge and diverge; the pedagogically important observation that the theories agree on most ordinary cases and diverge at the edges, which is a fact about moral theory worth understanding rather than an embarrassment; using the divergences to expose what each theory is actually committed to.
• Philosophical writing and argument. Reconstructing arguments in premise-conclusion form; the principle of charity and steel-manning; validity and soundness; identifying hidden premises; writing a thesis-driven philosophy paper, which is a specific genre most students have not previously written.

Optional Topics

• Moral responsibility, blame and moral luck (Williams, Nagel).
• Ethics and religion; the Euthyphro dilemma and divine command theory.
• Empirical moral psychology, experimental philosophy, and the situationist challenge.
• Theories of well-being and what makes a life go well.
• Moral status — animals, future generations, and the boundaries of moral concern.
• Ethical egoism and psychological egoism.
• Non-Western traditions — Confucian, Buddhist, African and Indigenous ethics.
• Sustained applied units — bioethics, environmental ethics, business ethics, technology ethics.
• Moral progress and whether the concept is coherent on a relativist view.

Resources & Tools

• The Elements of Moral Philosophy by James and Stuart Rachels (McGraw-Hill) — the most widely adopted textbook in American ethics courses. Short chapters, clear arguments, and paired with The Right Thing to Do, its companion reader.
• Ethical Theory: An Anthology edited by Russ Shafer-Landau (Wiley-Blackwell) — the standard comprehensive anthology, and the one most likely to be assigned in a course carrying this title. Shafer-Landau's The Fundamentals of Ethics is the matching textbook.
• Ethics: Theory and Contemporary Issues by Barbara MacKinnon and Andrew Fiala; Moral Philosophy: A Reader edited by Pojman and Vaughn.
• Primary texts the course is built on: Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics; Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals; Mill's Utilitarianism; Hume's Treatise Book III and Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals; Moore's Principia Ethica; Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong; Rawls's A Theory of Justice; Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy"; Foot and Thomson on the trolley problem; Williams on integrity and utilitarianism. The Kant and Mill are short enough to read entire, and both are in the public domain.
• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (plato.stanford.edu) — free, peer-reviewed, written by specialists, and the best single resource for this course. Its entries on consequentialism, Kant's moral philosophy, virtue ethics, moral realism and metaethics are more reliable than most secondary literature a student would otherwise find. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a free alternative.
• Project Gutenberg and the Online Library of Liberty — free full texts of Mill, Kant, Hume, Aristotle and Bentham. There is no reason to pay for the primary readings in this course.
• PhilPapers (philpapers.org) for the contemporary literature; journals include Ethics, Philosophy & Public Affairs, The Journal of Ethics and Utilitas.
• Writing support: Jim Pryor's "Guidelines on Writing a Philosophy Paper," free online, is the standard reference. Where the course carries a writing designation, use the institution's writing centre — it is ordinary practice, not remediation.

Career Pathways

Ethical theory sits behind several professional fields where reasoning about obligation is the actual work, and its usefulness is broader than the philosophy major's reputation suggests.

• Law (SOC 23-1011) — philosophy majors post among the highest average LSAT scores of any undergraduate field. The connection is direct: legal reasoning is argument reconstruction, distinction-drawing and principled application of rules to cases. Florida has eleven law schools, including UF Levin, FSU, Miami, FIU and Stetson.
• Medicine and the health professions — a viable pre-medical major with the science prerequisites completed alongside. Ethical theory is the foundation of clinical and research ethics, and medical school admissions committees value demonstrated ethical reasoning.
• Bioethics and clinical ethics (SOC 19-3099) — hospital ethics committees, institutional review boards and research compliance. Generally requires graduate work; Florida's large systems (AdventHealth, Orlando Health, BayCare, Baptist, Jackson Health, UF Health) employ ethicists and run IRBs.
• Compliance and corporate ethics (SOC 13-1041) — a substantial and growing field. Regulated industries — healthcare, financial services, defence contracting, all three heavily represented in Florida — employ compliance officers whose work is exactly the application of rules and principles to contested cases.
• Public policy and public administration (SOC 11-1021, 19-3094) — state government in Tallahassee, county and municipal government, and the policy nonprofits.
• Technology ethics and AI governance (SOC 15-1252, 13-1041) — real roles exist in AI policy, safety and responsible-technology teams. Technical competence is generally also expected, so a philosophy graduate who has learned to program is in a substantially better position.
• Teaching (SOC 25-2031, 25-1126) — secondary teaching with certification; postsecondary philosophy requires a PhD.
• Journalism, writing and editing (SOC 27-3023, 27-3041) — philosophy training produces disciplined prose and argument.
• Nonprofit and advocacy work, human rights organisations, and religious ministry.
• Graduate study in philosophy, law, public policy, medicine or bioethics.

The honest framing. Ethical theory is not a credential for anything by itself, and the academic philosophy job market is severely constrained — a student considering a PhD should examine placement data for specific programmes before committing. What the course reliably produces is the ability to work out what a contested question actually asks, identify where an argument fails, and defend a position in writing. Employers do not advertise for that under its own name, which is why philosophy graduates typically pair the major with a second field, a professional programme, or a technical skill. Paired that way, it is one of the stronger undergraduate preparations available.

Special Information

⚠ Title varies across Florida — and one variant signals a different emphasis

Institution	Title	Credits
statewide / FSU	Ethical Theory	3
FGCU	Ethics in Theory and Practice	3
UWF	Ethics	3

Credits agree at 3 everywhere, and the underlying subject is the same — this is title drift, not a subject split. But the wording points at a real difference in emphasis worth checking before you register.

FGCU's description is the most specific and the most unusual: it describes an in-depth exploration of a significant tradition or an important topic of debate — singular. That reads as a course that may go deep on one theory rather than surveying all of them, and the tradition chosen may vary by term and instructor. A student expecting a comparative survey of consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics could find a semester on virtue theory alone. Check the section's syllabus.

UWF's description is the broadest — the nature of the good, moral obligation, human excellence, and application to problems of the individual in relation to society — which reads as a full survey with an applied component.

Prerequisites and position in the curriculum

Prerequisites vary and are mostly writing-based rather than philosophy-based. FGCU requires ENC 1101 and ENC 1102 — the composition sequence — which is a workload signal more than a content gate. UWF lists no course prerequisite, but its section meets the College-Level Communication Skills Requirement, which carries the same implication from the other direction. Other institutions may require an introductory philosophy course.

An introductory philosophy course and a logic course are the useful preparation even where neither is required. The course reads primary texts and assumes you can identify a premise and follow a conditional; logic is the single most useful preparation because ethical arguments are unusually formal in structure.

PHI3670 is an upper-division course, normally taken in the junior or senior year. It is typically required or strongly recommended for the philosophy major, and it is a common elective and prerequisite-equivalent for students heading into law, medicine, public policy, social work, nursing and business. It relates closely to logic, philosophy of mind, political philosophy, and the applied ethics courses that build on it.

⚠ Ethical theory versus applied ethics — do not substitute one for the other

Florida institutions carry both a theory course under this number and applied courses (bioethics, business ethics, environmental ethics, ethics in criminal justice) at other numbers. They are different courses and a programme that requires one will not usually accept the other.

The practical distinction: an applied course spends most of its time on cases and uses the theories as tools; this course spends most of its time on the theories and uses cases as tests. A student who wants to argue about euthanasia or corporate responsibility will find the applied course more immediately satisfying; a student who wants to understand why those arguments take the shape they do needs this one. If a professional programme requires "an ethics course," confirm which kind before enrolling — the requirement is often specific.

Course format and workload

Taught as a discussion-based seminar or a lecture with substantial discussion, and the discussion is not decorative: arguments in this field are developed by being pressed. Assessment normally weights papers heavily — commonly two or three, one longer — alongside participation, short response papers and sometimes examinations.

Expect six to nine hours a week outside class. Reading volume is moderate at thirty to fifty pages a week; the density is what page counts fail to convey. Twenty pages of Kant's Groundwork is not twenty pages of a textbook, and a first pass that produces the feeling of having read it without understanding it is normal and expected. Two or three passes is the working method, and the second is where the argument becomes visible.

The single most useful habit, adopted from week one: after each reading, write the argument out as numbered premises and a conclusion. Fifteen minutes; it exposes immediately whether you understood the piece, and it is the skeleton of the paper you will write about it.

⚠ Philosophical writing is a genre, and it is not the essay you have been writing

The most common cause of a disappointing grade in this course is a well-written paper that summarises. Summary is not argument, and a paper reporting what Kant and Mill each thought — however accurately — has not done the assignment.

What is expected instead: a clear thesis stated early; the strongest version of the opposing position, presented fairly enough that someone holding it would accept the description; an argument; and a response to the best objection. Steel-manning is the professional standard in philosophy — defeating a weak version of an opponent's view demonstrates nothing, and instructors grade accordingly.

Style is plain. Short sentences, defined terms, no ornament, first person where it is the clearest option. Philosophical prose is judged on clarity of argument, and elaborate writing generally conceals rather than displays thought.

Articulation and transfer

PHI3670 carries the same SCNS number across Florida public institutions and SCNS equivalency governs transfer of the credit. As an upper-division course it does not appear in A.A. programmes and is taken after transfer.

One caution. Because the FGCU description permits a single-tradition deep dive while others survey the field, a receiving department may ask what your section actually covered when the course is being used to satisfy a specific major requirement. Keep the syllabus. This is minor for elective credit and occasionally matters for major credit.

⚠ What students find hardest

Three things, reliably:

The absence of a verdict. Students expect the course to determine which theory is correct. It does not, and some conclude the enterprise is arbitrary. It is not: positions are assessed by argument, and arguments succeed or fail on statable grounds. The skill being trained is careful reasoning about genuinely unsettled questions — which describes most consequential real-world decisions.

The discovery that your own view has costs. Nearly every student arrives holding a rough position, and the course's most reliable effect is showing that it entails something the student does not accept. That is the course working. Refining a position under pressure is the exercise; abandoning it in favour of "everyone has their own values" is the retreat the course is designed to make unavailable.

Taking seriously views you find repugnant. Reconstructing an argument charitably before attacking it is a discipline, and it is harder in ethics than anywhere else because the stakes feel personal. It is also the single most transferable skill the course teaches, and it is in short supply outside the classroom.

AI Integration

Ethical theory has an unusual relationship to AI: the tools are useful to students, easy to misuse in ways specific to this discipline, and the subject matter increasingly applies to the tools themselves.

Where the tools genuinely help. Explaining a difficult passage — the Groundwork in particular repays having a patient explainer available. Generating objections to your own argument, which is a real use: asking what a committed utilitarian would say to your draft surfaces weaknesses before your instructor does. Checking whether your reconstruction of a position is fair. And clarifying the structure of a theory you are struggling to hold in mind.

Where they fail, and the failures are specific to this field.

Generated ethical writing is fluent, balanced and shallow — a well-organised survey of what each theory would say, ending in a judicious refusal to conclude. That is precisely the paper this course grades down. The assignment is to take a position and defend it; balanced summary is the failure mode, not the goal.

Attributions and arguments require checking. Positions get assigned to the wrong philosopher, formulations of the categorical imperative get blended, and thought experiments get described in subtly altered forms. In a discipline where the exact form of an argument is the content, a plausible-looking misreconstruction is worse than none.

Models are trained toward moral hedging. Asked a contested ethical question, they tend to present considerations on all sides and decline to commit. That disposition is reasonable for a general-purpose assistant and is the opposite of what philosophical writing requires. A student who absorbs the register will write papers that never argue.

Academic integrity. Policies vary widely between philosophy departments and you must read your instructor's. Beyond compliance, the point specific to ethics is worth stating without moralising: the papers are not evidence that an argument exists — they are evidence that you can construct one, and there is no route to that ability except constructing them. A student who outsources the writing in an ethics course has outsourced the only thing the course was offering, and has also, incidentally, supplied a data point about their own practical reasoning.

The subject matter now applies to the tools. Questions about the moral status of artificial systems, responsibility for automated decisions, the distribution of benefits and harms from a general-purpose technology, and what obligations developers owe to people affected by systems they did not consent to — these are not new ethical questions; they are the standard ones arriving in new cases. Consequentialist, deontological and virtue-based analyses of the same AI policy question genuinely diverge, which makes contemporary technology one of the better proving grounds available for the theories this course teaches. A student who can run that analysis properly has something specific and currently scarce.