PHIL 350 | Moral Psychology and Metaethics

This course is focused on the interconnection between value judgments and a scientific perspective on the world and human psychology. Drawing on philosophical work that connects to and draws implications from attempts to study human behavior scientifically, the course explores answers to questions like: What motivates ethical action -- is it emotions, reasoning, or something else? What is the connection between a person's values and their behavior? As students explore various answers to these questions, they will draw connections and look at the implications of those answers for epistemological and metaphysical issues connected to ethics, such as whether morality is objective or subjective; whether morality can be universal or whether it is relative to a person, to some aspect of a person's psychology, or to a community; whether ethical language is an expression of a person's feelings or a statement of some fact (be it a fact about the community or the psychology of the speaker, or a non-natural fact); and whether moral responsibility requires freedom of choice.