Ethics Civics In A Multicultural World

AY2024/2025 Semester 2

This course aims to equip you with the necessary philosophical foundations to understand theories of ethics and subsequently apply those theories to real-life scenarios and issues. It also aims to enable you to understand and critically assess the civic institutions that structure their local and global communities. To these ends, the course will examine the nature of ethics, its understanding across different cultures, and how it is manifested in concepts, social structures, and governance institutions. Topics to be explored include human rights, democracy, freedom of speech and inequality. The rights and duties of citizenship shall be a unifying theme. You will think through assumptions they hold on all of these matters. They will be provided with the tools to understand various and even contradictory perspectives on these important issues. There will be a substantial amount of time devoted toward understanding Singapore's own institutions and ideologies, which are of course products specific to the country's own unique historical and geo-political circumstances. We expect that you will have better appreciation of the country's institutions after reading the module.