Speaka de English?
One of the courses that I'm taking is Business Ethics.
I'm taking this course because it's another Ethics course (and I thoroughly enjoyed the one I took before), and because I figured it might be pertinent.
There are, however, multiple downsides:
- It's not, strictly speaking, a 2nd year course. It's a first course (content-wise) that requires all the people taking it to have completed a year of college. There's nothing in this course, so far, that I haven't covered between my Critical Thinking course and the Contemporary Modern Issues course. In fact, we're covering the content of both of those courses in *significantly* less detail.
- The class is populated by full-time business people looking to pad out their resume with a 'Bachelor of Business Administration Degree', as it's mandatory for that degree. While I initially thought it would make the class somewhat interesting by providing me with smart, educated people to debate with, it would appear that I have greatly over-estimated my classmates.
We have to do a group essay on a situation (the OK Tedi Mining disaster, should anyone be interested). Last week, we had to split ourselves up into groups of four. The week before that, I was asked to join a group. That got me chuffed (last one for soccer as a kid, first one for philosophy when older). Until today, which was the group meeting.
It's like we're not even speaking the same language, like the fundamentals of the course just swooshed over the other people's heads. Like they're a bunch of morons...
Let me break it down:
All humans have the Right to Life, which in it's minimum terms means that they have a right not to be harmed.
To turn that on it's head is to say that every human being has a Moral Obligation *not* to harm any other human being.
If I am an employee of a mining operation, and I am told that it's my job to dump [poison] into the water that feeds several hundred villages, then doing that job violates my Moral Obligation.
While on the other hand I (presumably) have a Moral Obligation to feed my family.
This second Moral Obligation does not negate the first Moral Obligation. The first Moral Obligation does not negate the second Moral Obligation. Both exist. The weight we place on these Moral Obligations is determined by who we are, and how we choose to live our lives.
The people in the group I'm with don't seem to get this. They seem to believe that when I say "People have a Moral Responsibility *not* to poison the Fly River" to mean "People don't have a Moral Responsibility to feed their families".
This course appears to have been a mistake. It's rapidly ceasing to be fun and/or interesting, and becoming a chore as I have to teach my group the course material again and again...