Course Content Survey: Foundations of Ethics

I have made slight mechanical corrections without editorial notation. To the student who wroter her or his course content survey responses in Norwegian: De er velkommen a tale norsk, je forstar Dem, men jeg tenker de bor skrive engelsk i denne kartlegging.

What aspect or assignment in this course has been the most difficult for you? Explain briefly.

Reading and completely understanding the different classical thought systems.
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Lesning [reading]
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The hardest part so far has been understanding some of the information presented in the required reading before it is explained. Reading can rake a while sometimes.
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Understanding the terms, speech, vocabulary, etc. of the readings. It just takes a little more time to read through the books.
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MA: A little more time than what?
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Papers. Finding time to write them while there's other major homework.
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MA: Welcome to college. Welcome to life. I sympathize entirely. Now do your work.
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Understanding the material to its fullest. Spending the time to fully get what I need to done on time. On top of other courses this class I felt was the most time consuming because I did not fully understand the material. Because of the burden of other courses I got very discouraged when it came time to spen on this course and it took me two days to get through Kant's 1&2 chapters. After which I honestly can say that I stopped concentrating on the course so much I think that started to reflect on my performance in the course.
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MA: perhaps you have set your standard for achievement unreasonably high. To understand Kant "fully" may not be possible. Surely, to spend only two days working through Kant is an insufficient allotment of time. Clearly, this is difficult material. I can only assure you that ultimately advantage accrues from meditation upon the material. It cannot be rushed; I have emphasized this at several points in the course, and gave suggestions orally and in the syllabus to support reading.

At the same time, I myself have been swamped with work: not only class preparations and grading, but all manner of administrative tasks, so I understand the predicament you face quite well. I had said, for example, that I was willing to make recordings of the course readings -- the technical difficulties experienced with this initially bled into the time crunch of the latter parts of the semester, and those recordings have not been made.

So, we do as well as we can given the resources we have.
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The second assignment was the most difficult assignment for me (research paper). I felt like we didn't get enough time to research.
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MA: Quick comment on this: perhaps you did not notice that ALL the assignments for the course are in the syllabus, distributed on the first day of class. Thus, nearly three months were available for research. But you express a feeling, not a fact, and certainly many times something seems other than it is.
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The communitive thought report because it's almost impossible to figure that some of the ethic systems mean especially if your using Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill's books as references. [sic.]
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MA: Perhaps then Kant and Mill should not be your references.
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I have found this course to be moving at a comfortable pace for me. It is not extensive in note taking but packed with knowledge.
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MA: I can only hope to be worthy of such a comment in every course I teach.
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The questionnaire project was the most difficult partly because it was the first assignment but also because it required a lot of knowledge about ethics which was still a new subject for me. It was a good assignment but would work better either as a long ongoing project or as one of the later assignment.
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MA: This is a model course content survey response. It identifies the difficulty and proposes two excellent solutions. Well done. I had a sense of the difficulty; I shall closely consider the solutions offered.
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What aspect of the course has been the least difficult? Explain briefly.

a lytting [listening]
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Putting together the survey was not bad. It was aimed towards our interests, which made it more interesting than I had originally thought it would be.
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Survey assignment was pretty interesting and fun.
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The questionnaire because getting the surveys filled our and organized is pretty simple if you like the topic.
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I have found our in-class discussion to be the least difficult and the most helpful aspect of the course.
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Taking notes, going over and understanding the readings.
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The way in which the teacher helps us to understand the ethical theories, systems, terms, etc.
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Attending and listening to the material given to me. It was interesting but difficult to comprehend.
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The classical ethics paper which was a pretty straight forward research paper. More time would have [been] nicer.
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MA: As my friend Lewis Walton was wont to say, "God made twenty-four hours in a day."

What did you think you were going to learn that you haven't learned?

I thought we would be discussing current moral issues as a whole and not just in our first survey / paper.
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debatter [debate]
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More situational things.
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More specific ethical issues found in everyday life such as work oriented ethics or social ethics, a more applicable approach rather than a philosophical one.
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More examples of theories would help in the understanding.
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N/A
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None
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My perception of Ethics at the beginning of the the class was completely wrong.
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MA: So, if I understand this correctly, your perception of Ethics at the beginning of the class was in fact not completely wrong, but you are surprised to learn that you had an accurate perception of Ethics.
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What are you learning that you didn't expect to learn?

Just theories behind morals.
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I've learned about the ethical systems, and that I will have a new sense of knowledge and reason whenever I hear a universal question.
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N/A
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N/A
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Epictetus, Plato, Socrates, Kant
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Epictetus
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MA: To which Kant (and perhaps also Wittgenstein) would respond "impossible".
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hva opp epictetus
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MA: Virkelig, hva opp.

There is so much information on ethical systems that has been presented. I did not know that we would go so int depth on so many.
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MA: Funny; my impression is that we've hardly scratched the surface, and only viewed a very narrow spectrum.
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That my natural school of thought does in fact correspond to a real school of thought and moral system.
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Classical systems -- however, I understand why we are spending ideas on past ideas.
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