Why is Murder Wrong?

Why is murder wrong?  It is a far more difficult question than we may think.  This course will give a series of answers to this question, and raise difficulties to each of these answers.  It will be a journey that will begin in ancient Greece, take us to the Enlightenment, and end with contemporary thinkers.  It will include such thinkers as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham,  Friedrich Nietzsche, John Rawls,  Jean Paul Sartre, and Emanuel Levinas.   We will begin with metaethics, exploring the nature of ethical statements.  What is the difference between ethical realism and  ethical nominalism? We will then look at relative ethics, where ethical statements vary from person to person or community to community.   This section includes lectures on social contract theory, ethical subjectivism, cultural relativism, and divine command theory.

There are three sections on universal ethics.  First, we will look at ethical systems based on the teachings of Aristotle, including both virtue ethics and natural law..  Then we will explore consequential ethics, where the ethical is whatever leads to the best consequences.  This will include ethical egoism, ethical altruism, and finally the most popular approach, utilitarianism.  We will compare this to the duty ethics of Kant, and explore the feminine care criticism of Kant.   Or perhaps the source of ethics is intuition.  Finally, we will ask whether ethical statements have any meaning at all, or perhaps we need to accept ethical nihilism.

In the end, we will suggest a solution to the question, what makes murder wrong.  Enjoy this journey through the fascinating world of philosophical ethics.  Lawyers in Florida can get Continuing Legal Education credits for this course.