KIE Graduate Instructor in Ethics Dimitri Putilin will be offering a one-time only course for undergraduates during the spring semester:

Religion, Ethics, Psychology {Ethics 290S.06/Psych 290S.01/ICS 290S.11}

Tuesday/Thursday 1:25 – 2:40pm

The course will consider two distinct perspectives on ethics: religious and psychological. Religions provide the oldest, immensely influential accounts of what it means to be moral; with its empirical approach and innovative methods, moral psychology is able to shed new light on how moral ideals shape people’s thoughts and behavior in the modern world. We explore and contrast the ideals of moral perfection described in Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism, and complement this with the understanding of morality which is emerging from empirical research in moral psychology, covering both established knowledge and current controversies. No prior knowledge of religion or psychology is required.

In conjunction with a talk at the University of Texas Southwestern’s Ethics Ground Rounds program, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong was interviewed on public radio station KERA’s “Think” program regarding an expansion of the designations for states of living, particularly in regards to the ethics of organ procurement for donation.

Walter Sinnott Armstrong’s free online class on reason and logic, offered through Coursera, a California-based company that’s partnered with a dozen universities worldwide to offer higher education to the masses, is Duke’s most popular course. “Think Again: How to Reason and Argue,” co-taught by UNC-Chapel Hill philosophy professor Ram Neta, reaches farther than Sinnott-Armstrong thought possible. “I never imagined that I would have so many students in my entire career,” he said. “It would take hundreds of years to reach that number of students in a normal classroom.”

Read more on Duke Today.

Update 10/19/2012: Enrollment for Sinnott-Armstrong’s Coursera course now over 100,000