What is a good life?  What is the right thing to do?  Are there any
objective moral standards, or are moral norms only relative to a
culture or individual?  These are the fundamental questions of
ethics.  In this course we will study the classic ethical theorists
who address these questions: Plato, Aristotle, Bentham, Mill and
Kant, as well as more contemporary takes on their theories and
topics such as cultural relativism and feminist ethics. Toward the
end of the course, we turn to some “life and death issues”: the
ethics of abortion and the death penalty and class debates.