PHI 338 Global Ethics East & West Full Curriculum Program Fall 2016 Semester - Prague

This interdisciplinary course aims to serve as an introduction to the new and growing field of global ethics. The main objective of the course is to explore the ethical dimensions of the dominant world cultures (primarily of Asia vis-a-vis the West) and so to equip students with the conceptual tools that enhance one's ability to analyze in a culturally informed and sensitive way urgent ethical problems of our globalizing and yet increasingly fragmented world. As such the course may be of interest to both students of social sciences (e.g. political science, international relations or international business) and students of humanities (e.g. philosophy, cultural studies, education, arts). The course will involved both a fair amount of ethical theory necessary to grasp the basic differences between world's main ethical traditions, and sufficient number of case studies to show real-life applicability of global ethics as a practice-oriented discipline. While avoiding the reductionist temptation to play down inter-cultural differences in order to bring out cross-cultural commonalities in various ethical traditions, the course will explore possibilities of a genuinely global consensus with regard to the ethical questions that must be addressed by humankind as a whole. In this sense, global ethics is by definition a search for a soft-universalism, that is for a common ethical ground on which theorists and practitioners of all sorts of trans-national and trans-cultural affairs could meet despite their different philosophical, cultural and religious backgrounds.