Postgraduate Course: New Paradigms in Ethics (Online) (EFIE11503)
Course Outline
| School | Edinburgh Futures Institute |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
| Course type | Online Distance Learning |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | Approaches to ethics need to meet the many challenges presented in our rapidly changing and uncertain world. The course will present three ethical paradigms that have arisen in response: virtue, narrative and community. It will consider their origins and development and provide opportunities for them to be deployed and critically assessed. |
| Course description |
In recent decades, approaches to ethics based on duty and consequences have been called increasingly into question. Virtue, narrative and community have emerged as three new paradigms, particularly as a result of the work of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. These paradigms have been considered to provide better models for how ethics may be learned, communicated and transmitted in current societies, promoting ethical resilience in settings when priorities can too easily be determined by the pursuit of short-term advantage.
The seminar course begins by providing a summary overview of the principal modern approaches to ethics. These will be critically examined and then the three new paradigms of virtue, narrative and community will be presented by the course organiser and students and discussed. Debate sessions will follow, opened by students and related to their programme, in which the paradigms will be deployed to interrogate topic ethical issues in society, the economy and data.
Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) - Online Hybrid Course Delivery Information:
The Edinburgh Futures Institute will teach this course in a way that enables online and on-campus students to study together. To enable this, the course will use technologies to record and live-stream student and staff participation during their teaching and learning activities. Students should note that their interactions may be recorded and live-streamed (see the Lecture Recording and Virtual Classroom policies for more details). There will, however, be options to control whether or not your video and audio are enabled.
You will need access to a personal computing device for this course. Most activities will take place in a web browser, unless otherwise stated. We recommend using a device with a screen, a physical keyboard, and internet access.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2026/27, Available to all students (SV1)
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Quota: 0 |
| Course Start |
Semester 1 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Lecture Hours 1,
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 19,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
176 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
The course will be assessed by means of the following components:
1) Audio Podcast (60%)
7-8 minute audio podcast accompanied by a script, presenting your response to an ethical challenge.
Learning Outcomes Assessed by Component: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
2) Annotated Bibliography (40%)
An annotated bibliography of 10 sources used for the podcast (180-200 words per source).
Learning Outcomes Assessed by Component: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 |
| Feedback |
Feedback on any formative assessment may be provided in various formats, for example, to include written, oral, video, face-to-face, whole class, or individual. The Course Organiser will decide which format is most appropriate in relation to the nature of the assessment.
Feedback on both formative and summative in-course assessed work will be provided in time to be of use in subsequent assessments within the course.
Feedback on the summative assessment(s) will be provided in written form via Learn, the University of Edinburgh's Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).
Formative Feedback Opportunity:
Formative feedback is ongoing feedback which monitors learning and is intended to improve performance in the same course, in future courses, and also beyond study.
The debate presentation contributions are a formative peer feedback event. |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Critically assess different ethical paradigms.
- Critically analyse how ethical paradigms and societal factors shape each other.
- Reflect on and develop their own ethical perspectives.
- Apply ethical understanding to varied and unpredictable professional and societal contexts.
- Make ethically informed decisions in situations not covered by formal codes.
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Reading List
Indicative Reading List
Essential Reading:
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).
Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991).
Alasdair MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Recommended Reading:
Nafsika Athanassoulis, Virtue Ethics (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 53-80.
Julia Driver, Ethics: The Fundamentals (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 136-53.
Gilbert Meilaender, The Theory and Practice of Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). (no e-book)
Susan Moller Okin, 'Feminism, moral development, and the virtues', in How Should One Live? Essays on the Virtues, ed. Roger Crisp (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 211-29.
Peter Simpson, 'Contemporary virtue ethics and Aristotle', The Review of Metaphysics 45 (1992), 503-24; and in Virtue Ethics, ed. Daniel Statman (Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 245-59.
Further Reading:
Bart van der Sloot, Privacy as Virtue: Moving Beyond the Individual in the Age of Big Data (Intersentia, 2017).
Karen Broadley, 'Applied Ethics for Child Protection: What Would Aristotle Say?' Ethics and Social Welfare 15, 2 (2021), 135-50.
Anna-Lena Guske et al. 'Stories That Change Our World? Narratives of the Sustainable Economy: Narratives of the Sustainable Economy', Sustainability 11 (2019), 6163.
Anshu Saxena Arora et al. Managing Social Robotics and Socio-Cultural Business Norms: Parallel Worlds of Emerging AI and Human Virtues (Springer, 2022).
Mihaela Constantinescu et al. 'Understanding Responsibility in Responsible AI: Dianoetic Virtues and the Hard Problem of Context', Ethics and Information Technology 23, 4 (2021), 803-14.
Mirko Farina et al., 'AI and Society: A Virtue Ethics Approach', AI & Society (2022).
Thilo Hagendorff, 'A Virtue-Based Framework to Support Putting AI Ethics into Practice', Philosophy & Technology 35, 3 (2022), 55.
Tom Harrison and David Walker, The Theory and Practice of Virtue Education (Routledge, 2018).
James MacAllister, 'Utopianism of the Present: MacIntyre on Education and the Virtue of Hope', International Critical Thought 9, 3 (2019), 436-46.
Teun J. Dekker, Seven Democratic Virtues of Liberal Education: A Student-Inspired Agenda for Teaching Civic Virtue in European Universities (Taylor & Francis, 2023).
Geoff Moore, 'The Virtue of Governance, the Governance of Virtue', Business Ethics Quarterly 22, 2 (2012), 293-318.
Kevin Morrell and Stephen Brammer, 'Governance and Virtue: The Case of Public Order Policing', Journal of Business Ethics 136, 2 (2016), 385-98.
Raul P. Lejano and Shondel J. Nero, The Power of Narrative: Climate Skepticism and the Deconstruction of Science (Oxford University Press, 2020).
Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change: Human Virtues of the Future, ed. Allen Thompson and Jeremy Bendik-Keymer (MIT Press, 2012).
Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems, ed. Rebecca L. Walker and P. J. Ivanhoe (Clarendon, 2007).
Kathryn MacKay, 'Public Health Virtue Ethics', Public Health Ethics 15, 1 (2021), 1-10.
Drue H. Barrett, Leonard W. Ortmann, and Stephanie A. Larson. Narrative Ethics in Public Health (Springer International Publishing AG, 2022).
Handbook of Virtue Ethics in Business and Management, ed. Alejo José G. Sison (Springer Netherlands, 2020). |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | Ethics,Community,Narrative,Virtue,PG,Level 11,EFI |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr David Grumett
Tel: (0131 6)50 8970
Email: David.Grumett@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Yasmine Lewis
Tel:
Email: yasmine.lewis@ed.ac.uk |
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