Course Description

From dating apps to family life, Instagram to the workplace, we all want to have good relationships and live a good life. What does that look like in the modern world? Everyday life is complex and we are often presented with relationships, situations, and technologies that ask us to make compromises, whether we know it or not. This course looks at some of these everyday ethical questions through the lens of different scales of human relationships. It will equip students with ethical frameworks through which to view these relationships, enabling them to identify and develop their own values to navigate them. It will examine five key relationships through cross-cultural perspectives: (1) with oneself — including self-care, self-forgiveness, and conscience; (2) with friendship and dating; (3) with one’s immediate community — including family and professional life; (4) the larger society in which one lives — including social media and the politics of respect; and (5) with the transcendence of mystery, the divine, and the sacred — including urban space and the ecological other with which we participate.