Overview

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This course is intended for professionals and individuals seeking to develop a practical, structured approach to ethical decision-making in business and everyday life. In this course, you'll cover how to recognize and navigate moral dilemmas, build a sharper ethical vocabulary, distinguish between moral and legal permissibility, and apply a ten-category obligations framework to reach defensible decisions under pressure. You'll begin by examining what makes a moral dilemma genuinely difficult, learning to formulate and test the principles that support competing choices, and practicing how to revise those principles when they give the wrong result. From there, you'll replace the fact/opinion dichotomy with the more precise descriptive/normative distinction, expand your action categories from two to three, and apply the duties/consequences framework to real professional cases. You'll then work through a five-step process for identifying competing obligations, exposing the conflicts between them, weighing their relative strength, and narrowing your options to only those that are ethically defensible. By the end, you'll be equipped to approach any ethical situation at work with a clear, principled reasoning process — and the confidence to make decisions you can explain and defend.

Syllabus

Encountering Moral Dilemmas

Ethical dilemmas are a routine feature of professional life, so when you face a situation where your obligations pull in different directions, having a structured way to think through your options makes the difference between a confident, defensible decision and one you can't fully explain. In this module, you'll look at what makes a dilemma genuinely difficult, see how reasons function as the foundation for any moral choice, and work through a practical process for formulating, evaluating, and revising the moral principles that guide your decisions.

Enhancing Your Ethical Toolkit

Ethical reasoning requires a vocabulary precise enough to match the situations it describes. In this module, you'll move from the fact/opinion dichotomy to the more useful descriptive/normative distinction, expand your action categories from two to three (obligatory, permissible, and prohibited), and separate moral permissibility from legal permissibility.

Making Ethical Decisions

Knowing that a situation involves competing obligations is the starting point, not the finish line. In this module, you'll build a working knowledge of the ten categories of moral obligation, practice identifying which obligations are active in a given situation, learn how to surface the conflicts between them, and develop a method for determining which obligation carries the most weight.

Conclusion

You've built a robust ethical framework and now it's time to put it to work. In this module you'll test your knowledge and away with strategies to navigate moral complexity in any professional situation.