Ethics in Public Policy

O.P. Jindal Global University via Coursera

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Provider

Coursera
Pricing

Paid Course
Languages

English
Certificate

Certificate Available
Effort

6 weeks, 2 hours a week
Sessions

Self-Paced
Level

Beginner
Subtitles

English, Pashto, Farsi

Found in

Part of

Leadership and Society

Overview

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How do you make public policy decisions when rights, welfare, equality, economic growth, and social responsibility are in conflict? Ethics in Public Policy gives you the frameworks and practical perspective to evaluate difficult policy choices and understand their real-world consequences. Designed for aspiring policymakers, public administrators, governance professionals, social science students, and anyone interested in ethical decision-making, this course explores the principles behind responsible public policy. You’ll examine utilitarianism and libertarianism, justice and fairness, ethical economic policy, social security, equality, and global governance—and learn how these ideas shape real policy decisions. Go beyond theory through policy dilemmas and contemporary examples, including affirmative action, school funding, social security, healthcare rationing, COVID-19 policy, international trade, corruption, and environmental ethics. You’ll develop the ability to analyze public policies through ethical frameworks, assess fairness and equality, understand policymakers’ responsibilities, and evaluate how ethical governance can promote sustainable growth and development. Enroll today and strengthen your ethical reasoning, policy analysis, and public decision-making skills—so you can contribute to policies that are not only effective, but fair and responsible.

Syllabus

Utilitarianism and Libertarianism
- This module introduces you to the theories that form the very first strand of ethics – consequentialism. It will help you take an ethical approach to choose between gun or butter, war or peace, organ transplant or primary health care, equality or discrimination, and abortion or stem cell. It will allow you to use positive results as a basis for evaluating human actions. You will dive deep into the consequentialists’ theories, for example, Utilitarian, and learn about the greatest possible increase of pleasure over pain and the maximum possible satisfaction of preferences of welfare economics.
Justice as Fairness
- This module introduces you to the views of philosophers like Rawls and Marx in achieving justice and fairness in public policy. It will help you understand fairness and deal with questions such as how fair is affirmative action, are the electoral constituencies drawn to be fair, and how fair is our method of funding schools. This module also focuses on the fundamentals of justice as the central core of morality. You will discern how questions of justice and fairness inevitably arise when decisions are made regarding the distribution of benefits and burdens amongst various groups. This module refers to the Supreme Court judgment on contemporary cases, like Narmada Sagar Dams to build upon the concepts.
Ethics and Economic Policy
- “Modern high-tech warfare is designed to remove physical contact: dropping bombs from 50,000 feet ensures that one does not 'feel' what one does. Modern economic management is similar… from one’s luxury hotel, one can callously impose policies about which one would think twice if one knew the people whose lives one was destroying.” – Joseph Stiglitz. In this module, you will gain an in-depth understanding of ethics and its role in economic policy-making. You will discover the role that policymakers play in planning and formulating ethical economic policies. You will delve into how ethical policy-making can promote both growth and development.
Ethics and Social Security
- Is it fair to tax the young for the government to provide a generous retirement program for able-bodied seniors? Social security has come a long way from the initial moral precepts of caring for aging parents. With the government benefits supporting us from birth to death, we are slowly becoming one-issue voters with fewer concerns for the nation’s future. In this module, you will explore the various implications of social security funding, its moral groundings, and sustainability. It will help you understand the social security benefits. It will also help you examine the role of the government in providing social security benefits to the poor. You will comprehend the binds policymakers face regarding social security.
Equality of What?
- Amartya Sen in 1979 showed the world that wellbeing is not just a question of wealth or pleasure that a person has; it is a question of how people manage to live their lives and the ability to do certain things important to them. He developed the ‘capability approach’, which focuses on the people’s actual capability and freedom to live the kind of life they value. In this module, you will learn about Sen’s capability approach. It will help you understand the concept of equality and how to achieve true equality. You will analyze how to design public policies with a focus on achieving equality. You will also examine the role that policymakers play in designing such policies to promote equality.
Ethics in Global Governance
- In this module, you will gain an in-depth understanding of global and ethical governance. It will help you describe how to make governance more ethical. You will explore how thinking and acting ethically in anarchy can be difficult for all actors in the international arena, where there is no governance. You will also analyze how policymakers affect the ethical nature of governance.