Why You Should Take an Ethics Class

I’m a Cognitive Science major, so one of my core requirements on the decision-making track is PHIL 361: Ethics. My major track is about decision-making, and an important aspect of decision-making is the ethics of those decisions. Having had taken introductory ethics classes at high school and Washtenaw Community College, I had an idea of what we would cover when I registered last spring. Still, I wasn’t aware of how useful the knowledge would be. 

The class’s units are structured around questions such as what is good, what is right, and what is virtue. Each question seems simple, but they are more complex than one might think. By asking what is good, we find out what we should do to live good and happy lives, which is complicated because there are many different ways of living a good life. By asking what is right, we learn how to treat others and our duties to others. Since I am still in the process of taking this class, I haven’t learned about virtue yet, but I can only assume that it is just as complex as the earlier questions. 

Through this class, I learned various philosophical theories on how one should act, and during discussions, we found positives and negatives in each theory, allowing us to find some that suited us for our everyday lives. Our first paper was about what our ideal life would look like and what theories made that ideal life possible, which made me think about what I really want to experience in my life and what I’ll want to prioritize in the future as I try to live that ideal life I wrote about. 

When I first registered for this class, I thought it would just be a lot of reading and writing, similar to past experiences I had with philosophy classes. However, while there is a decent amount of reading and writing in this class, there is also a lot of really interesting information that changes your perspective in many aspects – from how to act to whether you should eat meat, donate to charity, or even whether you should adopt a child rather than have a child yourself. Personally, the meat section is what really changed my perspective because I agreed with every argument against eating meat, and yet I’m still eating meat anyway, so now I’m confused! I think I’ve resolved to only eat meat from places where I know where it comes from to ensure I am not eating factory-farmed meat, which unfortunately means when going to most restaurants, I cannot eat meat. While that is sad because I love adding chicken to my Chipotle, no matter how sketchy it seems, I can’t get the conditions of factory-farmed animals out of my head. 

The class was really unbiased in the sense that no opinions were forced on me. Each discussion was respectful, so if someone disagreed with me, there were no verbal attacks, but rather respectful disagreement and reasons for why. Also in discussions, hearing each person’s point of view on a topic was very interesting and changed my perspective on many issues because their reasoning made a lot of sense. 

All in all, this class has the potential to change the way you want to live your life and treat others. It taught me how to engage in respectful discussions as well, which is a very useful skill for any area of your life. It also encouraged me to be aware of my values, because, before this class, I hadn’t given much thought to my moral beliefs. 

If you’re interested in taking this class, I would highly recommend it, especially if you can get Dr. Dan Lowe as your professor! I have been taking it this fall, so keep that in mind if you’re registering. It requires one philosophy class as a prerequisite, which I had fulfilled at Washtenaw Community College online during the summer. The philosophy prerequisite also helped count for four credits toward a humanities distribution requirement for me. So, if you’re looking for humanities distribution credits as a non-philosophy and non-cognitive science major, I highly recommend taking ethics!

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