Hej hej,
I would like to summarise what the Ethics course was about. It was the 5 credits course and during the semester we did not have that many lectures or seminars which gave us a sufficient amount of time to prepare for the assignments.
First of all, I think this was one the best courses so far despite the first doubts. I mean the topic of ethics can be really broad, ranging from theoretical ethics to applied ethics, which I suppose is more valuable for us. And luckily this course covered practical things which we will unavoidably come across in the future.
The course started off with 4 lectures where the main theoretical grounds were introduced and discussed. Mainly, we discussed consequentialism, virtue ethics, and deontology. These were the primary concepts discussed throughout the course and lectures gave us an overview of how these grounds can form and affect the decision we make. Subsequently, we had several seminars. The first seminar was focused on sustainability reporting which currently has a certain significance for companies. We examined different reports and compared the information they contained. This was really valuable seminar since we could discuss differences and our perceptions within the class. For another seminar, we had to choose the journal paper article on the topic we wanted to explore, however, still related to the course topic. We wrote a summary of that article and provided feedback to another group and their article. I have to admit that really interesting topics were chosen and it was rewarding to listen to the summary of the articles. Finally, the main emphasis was on the final essay where we chose an ethical dilemma and examined the existing or imagined problem from the perspective of different ethical grounds. As the final essay was graded and more important than other assignments we had to submit, we had also (preliminary) topic presentation seminars where we introduced our prospective topic and explained what we want to examine and received feedback and help from the others.
Even though this course did not have any final exam, I am determined that I have learned a lot because we had to apply our knowledge of the real case in the final essay. To realize the aim of the final essay we had to describe the ethical dilemma that a certain person face with and discussed different approaches and ethical grounds.
For the upcoming year, this course will be implemented within the new course called Marketing, Responsibility and Ethics which should be more focused on business topics. I believe that the most interesting and rewarding things we learned will be kept so that you should not miss anything important.
Next time I will write about the course Value chain and networks in Bioeconomy which we took parallelly with Ethics course.
Enjoy the summer!
Denisa