module
Undergraduate Module Descriptor
PHL2118: Moral agency in social context
This module descriptor refers to the 2023/4 academic year.
Module Aims
The aim of this module is to encourage and enable you to reflect critically on ways in which people’s social conditions, including students’ own social conditions, might shape and constrain their moral knowledge and agency. The module draws on materials from the social sciences, such as the history of slavery and abolition, the sociology of inequality, and connects with analytical philosophical debates on collective moral responsibility, the social conditions of knowledge and ignorance, and the nature and extent of moral duties to needy others. In essence, you will learn to think about the ways in which society impacts on our individual capacity for moral agency.
| On successfully completing the programme you will be able to: | |
|---|---|
| Module-Specific Skills | 1. address philosophically the question of whether or how far people's moral beliefs and agency are determined or constrained by their social conditions of existence; 2. Demonstrate the ability to think about moral questions in a specifically social and institutional context. |
| Discipline-Specific Skills | 3. think, reason and argue analytically in social philosophy; 4. apply philosophical analysis to practical issues of historical and contemporary significance. |
| Personal and Key Skills | 5. deploy philosophical analysis in the assessment of everyday personal and social practices; and 6. demonstrate the ability to reflect on taken for granted assumptions. |