DPI-202: Moral Leadership: Ethics in Public Life

DPI-202 examines moral leadership in the context of professional public service. It focuses on cultivating proficiency in a range of skills that together help to ground moral action. These skills include: 1) accurately perceiving the moral dimensions of situations that arise in public service, 2) adequately weighing moral tradeoffs that have to be made as part of strategic action, and 3) effectively putting into reflective equilibrium, the verdicts of the heart and those of the head. Additionally, DPI-202 promotes 4) the capacity to entertain different moral perspectives, that is, the ability to temporarily live in another person’s moral universe and see the world through their eyes. The ability to do this well is an essential component to successfully practicing the skills needed for virtuous action. The class will be largely case-based, but also introduce moral and political theory and material from adjacent fields as needed to work through the cases. We will also prominently integrate quite a number of movies, both for the sake of making the cases come alive and to conceptualize how media representation of human experience can influence how people think about challenges.

This course is jointly offered by the School of Education as A212.