BAEcon Economics

This course unit will examine some hard moral questions: Is it ever right to abort a foetus? Should we punish people for what they do? Is it ever right to torture the innocent? Is morality relative to culture? By examining moral conundrums raised in applied ethics, normative ethics and metaethics, this course unit will provide an introduction to some central themes in moral philosophy.

One two-hour lecture and one one-hour tutorial per week.

Students should be able to:

• Identify some of the positions and arguments in debates within applied ethics;
• Compare and evaluate some key arguments and objections to consequentialism and its relation to other normative ethical views;
• Identify some of the positions and arguments in debates within meta-ethics.

Students should be able to:

• Articulate cogent arguments on applied moral issues;
• Write concisely, relevantly and analytically about the moral issues discussed in the course;
• Interpret and criticise conceptually complex material.

Students should be able to:

• Use research tools to effectively select resources in the preparation of assessments on ethics;
• Clearly communicate ideas about ethics.

Essay (1500 words) 50%

Exam (1.5 hours) 50%

The School of Social Sciences (SoSS) is committed to providing timely and appropriate feedback to students on their academic progress and achievement, thereby enabling students to reflect on their progress and plan their academic and skills development effectively. Students are reminded that feedback is necessarily responsive: only when a student has done a certain amount of work and approaches us with it at the appropriate time is it possible for us to feed back on the student's work. The main forms of feedback on this course are written feedback responses to assessed essays and exam answers.

We also draw your attention to the variety of generic forms of feedback available to you on this as on all SoSS courses. These include: meeting the lecturer/tutor during their office hours; e-mailing questions to the lecturer/tutor; asking questions from the lecturer (before and after lecture); presenting a question on the discussion board on Canvas; and obtaining feedback from your peers during tutorials.

• Foot, Philippa (1978). Virtues and Vices: And Other Essays in Moral Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press UK.
• Gover, J. (1990) Utilitarianism and its Critics. Macmillian, New York.
• LaFollette, Hugh (ed.) (2013). Ethics in Practice: An Anthology. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Wolff, Jonathan (2020). An introduction to moral philosophy. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Tuition fees for home students commencing their studies in September 2027 will be £10,050 per annum. Tuition fees for international students will be £33,100 per annum.

For general information please see the undergraduate finance pages.

All students should normally be able to complete their programme of study without incurring additional study costs over and above the tuition fee for that programme. Any unavoidable additional compulsory costs totalling more than 1% of the annual home undergraduate fee per annum, regardless of whether the programme in question is undergraduate or postgraduate taught, will be made clear to you at the point of application. Further information can be found in the University's Policy on additional costs incurred by students on undergraduate and postgraduate taught programmes (PDF document, 91KB).

We know that student finance can be complicated. The links below provide further information to help guide you.

Learn more about student finance options for UK students.

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As an international student you may be eligible for our Global Futures Scholarships. This is open to students starting their studies in September 2026.