This course has been designed expressly for you. It is your course. It’s about you, your life and the world you live in. For those reasons it may be the most relevant course you will take in your college career. How is this course relevant to your life? Well, if you consider personal happiness relevant; and if you think it’s important to develop your own thoughtful opinions about what is good and evil, right and wrong; and if you think it is important for you to make the right moral choices in your personal and professional lives, then you will find this course to be very relevant to how you want to live your life. We’ll be looking at a multitude of ethical issues that may arise from the following topics in our personal and professional lives. For example, the nature of evil, alcohol and drug abuse, social media, family values, the value of friendships, sex & love, workplace cultures, co-workers, bosses, customers & clients, advertising and marketing, racism & sexism in the workplace, the economy & political leadership, war and terrorism, the Global Village, and the natural environment. You’ll be asked to think through the ethical issues that arise from
the above topics (and others) and to justify your own decisions about what is right or wrong in case studies or scenarios involving these topics.

The Republic of Plato is one of the classic gateway texts into the study and practice of philosophy, and it is just the sort of book that has been able to arrest and redirect lives. How it has been able to do this, and whether or not it will be able to do this in your own case, is something you can only discover for yourself. The present guidebook aims to help a person get fairly deep, fairly quickly, into the project. It divides the dialogue into 96 sections and provides commentary on each section as well as questions for reflection and exploration. It is organized with a table of contents and is stitched together with a system of navigating bookmarks. Links to external sites such as the Perseus Classical Library are used throughout. This book is suitable for college courses or independent study.

The Introduction to Ethics Course was developed through the Ohio Department of Higher Education OER Innovation Grant. This work was completed and the course was posted in September 2019. The course is part of the Ohio Transfer Assurance Guides and is also named OAH046. For more information about credit transfer between Ohio colleges and universities, please visit: www.ohiohighered.org/transfer.Team LeadNatalie Kertes-Weaver                       Ursuline CollegeContent ContributorsBenjamin Cordry                                Lorain County Community CollegeBrad Lipinski                                      Cuyahoga Community CollegeToni Nicoletti                                      Cleveland State UniversityLibrarianMandi Goodsett                                 Cleveland State UniversityReview TeamTravis Hreno                                      University of AkronRobert Loftis                                      Lorain County Community College 

Welcome to Introduction to Ethics.  This fully online, open access course is intended to meet the needs of teachers and students undertaking a study of introductory level ethics and moral theory[Image - SVG SILH - CC0 1.0 ]

This module contains links to two textbooks on critical thinking and indicates which sections are most relevant to thinking well about ethics.[ Image - Nina Paley, "You May Be Right" - CC BY-SA 3.0 ]

Excerpt edited for the General Intro to Ethics Student:Ethics for A-Level: Introduction -Mark Dimmock and Andrew Fisher, Ethics for A-Level. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2017, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0125 (CC BY 4.0). [Image - olarte.ollie, "detective" - licensed by CC BY-SA 2.0]

This module presents sources in normative ethics.  There are two types of material:  first (in "Section 2"), there is a collection of primary sources with introductions, biographical sketches, and reading/reflecting questions; second (in "Section 3"), there is a link to a textbooks and the sections therein that significantly address normative theory via primary sources.[Image Source - Marsayas, AGMA Ostrakon Themistocle3  - CC BY-SA 3.0. ]

This module presents two resources.  First (in "Section 2"), selections from a textbook that summarize major moral theories; second (in "Section 3"), a link to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Ethics.[Image source: "Moral Compass" by Paul Downey is licensend under CC BY2.0 ]

This section includes introductory and intermediate resources for metaethics. It includes links to open education textbooks with chapters on metaethics that can be used for a brief introduction to meta-ethics, as well as original source readings on topics in meta-ethics. A link to Plato's Euthyphro is included for discussion of the Euthyphro problem, which is related to criticisms of Divine Command Theory and issues having to do with the source and justification of moral judgments. As well, portions of Hume's Treatise is included as it regards the source and justification of moral judgments. There are also links to G. E. Moore's Open Question argument and other links to help students understand the main issues in metaethics. The textbook chapters and original source materials can be used together to orient students to the main issues, as well as to introduce them to the original arguments.

This course studies what is language and what does knowledge of a language consist of. It asks how do children learn languages and is language unique to humans; why are there many languages; how do languages change; is any language or dialect superior to another; and how are speech and writing related. Context for these and similar questions is provided by basic examination of internal organization of sentences, words, and sound systems. No prior training in linguistics is assumed.

This is an introductory textbook in logic and critical thinking. The goal of the textbook is to provide the reader with a set of tools and skills that will enable them to identify and evaluate arguments. The book is intended for an introductory course that covers both formal and informal logic. As such, it is not a formal logic textbook, but is closer to what one would find marketed as a critical thinking textbook. Downloadable as a pdf file.

The goal of this text is to present philosophy to newcomers as a living discipline with historical roots. While a few early chapters are historically organized, my goal in the historical chapters is to trace a developmental progression of thought that introduces basic philosophical methods and frames issues that remain relevant today. Later chapters are topically organized. These include philosophy of science and philosophy of mind, areas where philosophy has shown dramatic recent progress. This text concludes with four chapters on ethics, broadly construed. I cover traditional theories of right action in the third of these. Students are first invited first to think about what is good for themselves and their relationships in a chapter of love and happiness. Next a few meta-ethical issues are considered; namely, whether they are moral truths and if so what makes them so. The end of the ethics sequence addresses social justice, what it is for one’s community to be good. Our sphere of concern expands progressively through these chapters. Our inquiry recapitulates the course of development into moral maturity