Three Important Moral Issues

Fifth part of course
Topic in Morality/ Just War, Medical Ethics and Business Ethics

Important documents for reference

Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Nuremberg Principles
Geneva Conventions
Read the Tom Dooley letter in the library
Court TV Greatest Trials of the All Time The Court Martial of Lt. Caley

"Just War"

Click here for just war worksheet.

Tim O'Brien's "On the Rainy River"

Which steps did he follow in your chosen method of moral decision making--and which did he leave out?
What would you have done?
What would you do if that happened to you here and now and you were drafted to go to Iraq?

Obligations and Formation of the Just War Theory.

Three types of obligations: how does just war thinking flow from this?
"jus ad bellum"
"jus in bello"

Be able to apply these in concrete instances, like WWII or Vietnam or the recent U.S.-Iraq wars.

"Conscientious objectors" and "selective conscientious objectors" Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy on just war theory. Ethics Update, as usual, is a great resource on Ethics of War, Peace, & Terrorism

Bush' just war thinking as applied to the Gulf War Video "Remember My Lai"

Other sources recomemended on My Lai

Famous American Trials: The My Lai Cases
Ron Haeberle's photos from My Lai
Tom Dooley's letter in the library
Nuremberg Principles

Great video about Vietnam: Fog of War

Two heroes whose life illustrates key ideas

Deitrich Bonhoeffer
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King was not taken in first sem. 2003

Medical Ethics

Medical Ethics worksheet
NY times article about this Dateline Ethics program

Business Ethics

Possibilities include

Video: Some Bad, Some Good, Moral Stories. Carl Icahn, Jim Goodnight, Danny Meyer, Aaron Feuerstein, victor Crawford. Try this one about H. Brandt Ayers, whose The Anniston Star was judged to be one of the country's best by Time magazine and the Columbia Journalism Review.
Video: SWEAT Web site on Jim Keady & Leslie Kretzu. Web site offering Nike's position.
Pedro Arrupe's Men (and Women) for Others)
Case study: Ford Pinto (optional but recommended)
Michael Josephson's "Teaching Ethical Decision-Making and Princcipled Reasoning."

Web assignment

Choose one of these:

Watch one of these videos and write a summary of the key ideas.
Listen to one of these Speaking of Faith programs and write a summary of it.
.
Choose one of your classmates research projects concerning a topic about war, medical ethics or business ethics. Click here for a list of possibilities. Read it and then write a summary of what you learned. Then add a reaction paragraph. What did you learn? What do you think about what you read? Make sure you head your assignment with the topic author and a link to the web site you are reading.

Journal

Five parts, rubric grading: 1) One paragraph summary of the key idea of the section. 2) List and explain three of the most important ideas you want to remember from this section. Each idea must come from a different section: one about just war, one about medical ethcs and one about business ethics. 3) One image of that reminds you of the topic. Try to get a good, striking, meaningful image. Attribute, link, your source. 4) What the most relevant question for you from this section? Why not take some time to answer your question? 5) What should you try to do to make you a better person, a more moral person, from this study of these three key issues?

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