Section 1: Overview

What is Ethics?

We will begin an initial analysis on the topic of ethics by answering the following questions:

• What is ethics?

• How is ethics defined?

• How are choices, decisions, and developments labeled ethical or unethical?

To build foundational knowledge on this topic, we will examine seminal works of various philosophers and analyze how those works frame the foundational and ongoing conversations surrounding ethics. This background investigation will include a mixture of videos, excerpts from philosophical texts, and shorter articles that will provide the frame from which we view future readings and applications. Specifically, this section will provide us with common terminology to use when discussing larger subtopics in which ethical issues often arise. To finalize this foundational study, we will examine an ethical situation through the lens of these central texts and discuss the nuances in their interpretations and conclusions.

• Lesson 1:

  What is ethics? We will discuss the Central Question of the unit: How do we determine the right thing to do? We will determine what we need to know and be able to do to be successful on the Culminating Task. We will begin our exploration of ethics by analyzing a contemporary ethical dilemma.

• Lesson 2:

  We will continue our exploration of ethics by focusing on choices: how we make them individually, how we make them collectively, and how the consequences of those choices impact others. We will take an online quiz as a class and read about ethical decision making.

• Lesson 3:

  We will learn about text-dependent questions: how to use them to guide reading and how to respond to them in ways that are thoughtful and complete.

• Lesson 4:

  We will watch a video and read to learn about utilitarianism, one of the approaches to ethics.

• Lesson 5:

  We will deconstruct two highly complex sentences about philosophy to determine their meaning and analyze their syntax. We will watch a video and read to learn more about Kantian ethics and the rights approach to ethics.

• Lesson 6:

  We will continue to expand our understanding of ethics by reading about the rights approach and synthesizing our learning in an Ethical Approach Note-Taking Tool.

• Lesson 7:

  We will return to the Moral Machine quiz to reflect on the underlying reasoning behind our decisions and then learn about a new ethical approach focused on the idea of justice.

• Lesson 8:

  We will continue to expand our knowledge of ethics and its philosophical underpinnings by introducing another ethical approach, connecting it to the previous approaches studied, and examining codes of ethics from various organizations to see how ethical approaches are applied.

• Lesson 9:

  We will learn about the virtue approach to ethics and discuss how this approach is similar to and different than previous approaches we’ve studied.

• Lesson 10:

  We will prepare for the Section Diagnostic by using the ethical approaches we’ve studied to explore some thought experiments that represent ethical dilemmas.

• Lesson 11:

  We will draft a multiparagraph analysis of an ethical dilemma, using the information gained from texts in this section to analyze the dilemma.

• Lesson 12:

  We will revise our Section Diagnostic by focusing on our claims and support. Additionally, we will read the work of our classmates in order to provide feedback that will strengthen our writing.

• Lesson 13:

  We will review feedback on the Section Diagnostic. We will use the feedback to make revisions to our work.

• Lesson 14:

  We will commence an Independent Reading Program in which we choose texts to read independently as we progress through the unit. We will learn how to choose texts, what activities we may complete, about the final task, and about any materials we will use as we read our independent reading texts. We will begin by reading our texts, using Tools to help us take notes and analyze important textual elements.