Resource Library

The ethics slam is all about clear thinking, reasonable discussion and nimble observation about the many ways ethics is embedded in our lives. In the Slam, students respond to a selected Big Ethical Question as best–and as ethically as they can. Students choose a question and then are given three to five minutes to deliver their opinion and response to the chosen question. Their response to the question should be clear and systematic, with identification of ethical dimensions of the question, awareness of different viewpoints, and a normative ethical argument for their position on the question.

The purpose of research papers in the Ethics and Values course is to both help satisfy our CLO’s for the class, but also to teach the students important critical thinking skills, essential research skills, and writing skills. Reflection papers are also important, given one objective of the course is to invite students to clarify their own values, become more understanding of other values, and to create a stronger foundation and greater character strength upon which they can build their lives.

The purpose of group work in an ethics course is to teach students how to collaborative and cooperate with others in solving a problem or completing a task. Group work can reinforce skills learned through thought experiments, case studies, and role playing exercises. However, if not properly structured, group work can be very frustrating for students. You need to clearly give them the “what” “why” and “how” of the group assignment. Explain the assignment and set expectations of how the group will work together. Be sure to monitor the group’s progress by having aspects of the project due along the way. That’s very important to prevent group implosion; namely, require tasks towards completing the assignment be due at regular intervals between the group assignment and final presentation. The culmination of the group assignment can be an oral presentation, a written report, a research paper, or all of them combined.

The purpose of class discussions is to increase the students’ interest and engagement in the course material. Classroom discussions help students stay focused and will increase their preparedness when they know they’ll be called on to participate. Another benefit of discussions is they give you immediate feedback on the students’ comprehension as well as insight into their communication and reasoning skills.

Ethical role-playing is another activity to encourage students to apply the ethical reasoning and decision-making processes they are learning in class to concrete ethical situations or practical problems. Students demonstrate mastery of ethical reasoning and understanding of the various ethical theories by applying them to ethical challenges in a fun role-play with other students, which also allows them to develop and practice interpersonal and communication skills. In fact any thought experiment or case study can be turned into a role play where students might more easily uncover their hidden assumptions, implicit biases, and harmful stereotypes, while increasing empathy for others.

Thought experiments are hypothetical situations that test our intuitions in ways that challenge us to examine the adequacy of our habitual beliefs. Thought experiments can help reveal inconsistencies and a lack of clarity in our thinking by triggering counter examples and by raising questions in new and creative ways. They also force us out of our comfort zone and allow us to explore possibilities we may have previously rejected. They can also be an effective way to introduce a topic or philosopher. All in all, thought experiments are a great way to stimulate classroom discussions.

The purpose of case studies is to give students an opportunity to apply the theoretical and practical tools they are learning in their ethics courses. The wise use of case studies is also a powerful tool to teach and practice logic and reasoning skills in the context of moral decisionmaking. When done thoughtfully, case studies can help students increase their empathy for others and even uncover their own unexamined assumptions, implicit biases, and harmful stereotypes.

As immigration, technological change, and globalization reshape the world, journalism plays a central role in shaping how the public adjusts to moral and material upheaval. This, in turn, raises the ethical stakes for journalism. In short, reporters have a choice in the way they tell these stories: They can spread panic and discontent or encourage adaptation and reconciliation. In Murder in Our Midst, Romayne Smith Fullerton and Maggie Jones Patterson compare journalists' crime coverage decisions in North America and select Western European countries as a key to examine culturally constructed concepts like privacy, public, public right to know, and justice. Drawing from sample news coverage, national and international codes of ethics and style guides, and close to 200 personal interviews with news professionals and academics, they highlight differences in crime news reporting practices and emphasize how crime stories both reflect and shape each nation's attitudes in unique ways. Murder in Our Midst is both an empirical look at varying journalistic styles and an ethical evaluation of whether particular story-telling approaches do or do not serve the practice of democracy.

Media Ethics: Key Principles for Responsible Practice makes ethics accessible and applicable to media practice, and explains key ethical principles and their application in print and broadcast journalism, public relations, advertising, marketing, and digital media. Unlike application-oriented casebooks, this text sets forth the philosophical underpinnings of key principles and explains how each should guide responsible media behavior. Author Patrick Lee Plaisance synthesizes classical and contemporary ethics in an accessible way to help students ask the right questions and develop their critical reasoning skills, as both media consumers and media professionals of the future. The Second Edition includes new examples and case studies, expanded coverage of digital media, and two new chapters that distinguish the three major frameworks of media ethics and explore the discipline across new media platforms, including blogs, new forms of digital journalism, and social networking sites.

This chapter demonstrates the distinctive opportunities presented by studying ethics abroad for challenging both ethnocentrism and relativism. Instructors can expect to learn about particular pedagogical strategies to interrogate these stances, including the use of experiential learning, structured reflection and comparative analysis.

Virtue ethics (VE) theory and scholarship in media and communication have become increasingly vibrant and worthy of serious attention. For all VE has to offer, however, it is not unusual for the theory to be explained and applied inaccurately in the literature and in textbooks. This limits the theory’s potential for addressing enduring issues in media and communication, as well as emerging ones. I will argue that a major source of this theoretical distortion is the epistemological hegemony of “thin concepts” in ethics to the neglect of “thick concepts.” In particular, I will focus on the thinning out of four central concepts that are analytically distinct but closely related: virtues, practical reasoning, eudaimonia, and the common good. I will end this essay with a discussion of implications for the VE agenda in media and communication ethics.

Western Michigan Universitys Center for the Study of Ethics in Society has always had a generalist approach that is to say, an interdisciplinary orientation toward studying a broad range of ethical issues. This article explains how the centers generalist orientation developed and why it is desirable for promoting public reflection about ethical issues. It focuses on these dimensions: (a) valuing an across-the-curriculum approach to promote understanding of complex ethical issues; (b) adopting a broad, rather than narrow focus, when it comes to ethics; (c) committing to practical ethics, which bridges theory and practice to shed light on issues of practical relevance to all; and (d) decentering philosophy as the arbiter for what counts as doing ethics. The article ends with a look at challenges concerning stable funding and administrative support for a center that does not fit neatly into a single academic unit or specialty and shares some lessons learned.

Much moral disagreement between cultures centers on what meta-ethicists call “thick concepts,” such as cruelty and courage. The main question this article addresses is, What are the advantages of combining virtue ethics with casuistry for addressing thick concepts central to media ethics disagreements between cultures? A related secondary question is, How does this framework compare with “global media ethics” approaches that prioritize thin concepts, such as “right” and “ought”? The article argues that the virtue/casuistry combination: 1) preserves the contexts that give thick ethical concepts their meaning; 2) conceives of moral agents as situated selves and confirms the value of moral expertise; and 3) presses for closure while resisting codification.

In Journalism as Practice, Sandra L. Borden shows that applying philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre's ideas of a 'practice' to journalism can help us to understand what is at stake for society and for those in the newsrooms who have made journalism their vocation. She argues that developing and promoting the kind of robust group identity implied by the idea of a practice can help journalism better withstand the moral challenges posed by commodification.

The Companion opens with a comprehensive historical overview of ethics, including chapters on Plato, Aristotle, Hume, and Kant, and ethical thinking in China, India and the Arabic tradition. The second part covers the domain of meta-ethics. The third part covers important challenges to ethics from the fields of anthropology, psychology, sociobiology and economics. The fourth and fifth sections cover competing theories of ethics and the nature of morality respectively, with entries on consequentialism, Kantian morality, virtue ethics, relativism, evil, and responsibility amongst many others. A comprehensive final section includes the most important topics and controversies in applied ethics, such as rights, justice and distribution, the end of life, the environment, poverty, war and terrorism.

Rent on Amazon or iTunes: Bernadine Williams is a prison warden who, over the years, has been drifting away from her husband while dutifully carrying out executions in a maximum security prison. When she strikes up a unique bond with death-row inmate Anthony Woods, a layer of emotional skin is peeled back, forcing Bernadine to confront the complex-and often contradictory-relationship between good intentions, unrequited desires, and what it means to be sanctioned to kill.

Rent on Amazon or iTunes: he Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution is the first feature-length documentary to explore the Black Panther Party, its significance to the broader American culture, its cultural and political awakening for black people, and the painful lessons wrought when a movement derails.

Combining archival footage with testimony from activists and scholars, director Ava DuVernay's examination of the U.S. prison system looks at how the country's history of racial inequality drives the high rate of incarceration in America. This piercing, Oscar-nominated film won Best Documentary at the Emmys, the BAFTAs and the NAACP Image Awards.

Thought experiments are hypothetical situations that test our intuitions in ways that challenge us to examine the adequacy of our habitual beliefs. Thought experiments can help reveal inconsistencies and a lack of clarity in our thinking by triggering counter examples and by raising questions in new and creative ways. They also force us out of our comfort zone and allow us to explore possibilities we may have previously rejected. They can also be an effective way to introduce a topic or philosopher. All in all, thought experiments are a great way to stimulate classroom discussions.

TED Talks have many relevant topics that address issues and raise ethical questions.

The BBC 4 Radio station on YouTube is an excellent source of short video presentations on ethical topics.

Videos and TED Talks are another great source for stimulating classroom discussions. Click here to read some tips on how to integrate videos into your ethical discussions.

Ethical role-playing is another activity to encourage students to apply the ethical reasoning and decision-making processes they are learning in class to concrete ethical situations or practical problems. Click here to learn more about how to use-role playing to explore ethical issues.

The Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE) host an intercollegiate ethics bowl competition. Click here to visit their site which has case studies as well as resources for those competing and judging.

The purpose of case studies is to give students an opportunity to apply the theoretical and practical tools they are learning in their ethics courses. Click the link to see the case study analysis process.

The Parr Center for Ethics at UNC-Chapil Hill, runs the national high school ethics bowl. Click here to see their archive of ethical case studies based on current events.

Marcus Aurelius was Emperor of Rome from 161 to 180 AD. He governed over a golden era of the Roman Empire. Despite being an emperor Marcus had a difficult life. Marcus ruled as a philosopher king, he practiced Stoicism and wrote about his own Stoic practice in his journals. Meditations is considered one of the pillars of western philosophy and literature. It is also a rare primary source into the mind of a man who ruled over one of the greatest empires built by man.

Every so often, you meet people who radiate joy—who seem to know why they were put on this earth, who glow with a kind of inner light. Life, for these people, has often followed what we might think of as a two-mountain shape. They get out of school, they start a career, and they begin climbing the mountain they thought they were meant to climb. Their goals on this first mountain are the ones our culture endorses: to be a success, to make your mark, to experience personal happiness. But when they get to the top of that mountain, something happens. They look around and find the view . . . unsatisfying. They realize: This wasn’t my mountain after all. There’s another, bigger mountain out there that is actually my mountain.

Frontline begins at approximately 1 hour into program.

On Jan. 28, 1986, seven astronauts "slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God." America's space program was never the same.

William LeMessurier, one of the nation's most distinguished structural engineers, served as design and construction consultant on the innovative Citicorp headquarters tower, which was completed in 1977 in New York. The next year, after a college student studying the tower design had called him to point out a possible deficiency, LeMessurier discovered that the building was indeed structurally deficient. LeMessurier faced a complex and difficult problem of professional responsibility in which he had to alert a broad group of people to the structural deficiency and enlist their cooperation in repairing the deficiency before a hurricane brought the building down. His story was recounted in detail in "The Fifty-Nine-Story Crisis," which appeared in the May 29, 1995 issue of The New Yorker, and on November 17, 1995, LeMessurier himself came to MIT, from which he received his doctorate, to speak to prospective engineers about the decisions he had to make and the actions he took.

Produced by the Center for Applied Ethics at Duke University. Script was written by Aarne Vesilind, the Center's director at the time of production.

James Brusseau at Pace University has assembled some video case studies for business ethics.

NOVA has a four-part series that lays out what engineers have done in response to past disasters to make accidents more survivable. The aim is to engineer so as to avoid harm.

Western Michigan University has a useful manual on how to handle ethical cases and a set of cases on engineering ethics developed by Michael Pritchard through an NSF grant. These case studies have sets of comments by philosophers and engineers.

A very well-organized and thorough site devoted to ethical issues in engineering and science, including research ethics. It contains cases among its numerous resources as well as a host of useful links.

The Mudough Center at Texas Tech contains, among its other features, a nice set of cases in engineering ethics.

De Montefort University is one of the best sites for computer science. It has a European flavour, its treatment of privacy, for instance, evolving around the European Union's responses to the issue. It is fairly thorough and is updated frequently.

Another set of ethics codes which includes Canadian professional societies.

A catalog of over 850 codes of ethics