Questions of Value (Audiobook)
| Date: 11 April 2011, 14:10
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Our lives are filled with everyday questions of fact and finance. Which investment brings the highest return? What school district is the house in? What will this candidate do if elected? But the really fundamental questions of our lives, says Professor Patrick Grim, are questions of neither fact nor finance. They are questions of value. They are the deep questions that apply to every aspect of our lives.
What is it that gives something genuine value? What things are really worth striving for? What is it that makes life worth living? Are there values that transcend cultural differences? Can we have ethical values without religion? If the universe operates in terms of deterministic laws, how can there be real choice? Is all value subjective? We can even ask if life is always worth living, or whether in some situations we would be better off dead.
Questions of Value is a course for anyone who has ever felt the tug of such questions or who wants to fine-tune their ability to see how deeper questions of ethics and values apply to the choices that make up their lives.
In presenting this philosophical examination of the range of decisions we all encounter as we live our lives, Professor Grim has placed the accent on individual choice—and has not shied away from controversy. The issues he presents for your examination cover evolution and ethics, about whether punishment is justified by retribution or by deterrence, and about the differing lessons drawn from life's worst horrors by both religious and antireligious traditions.
What values, for instance, are involved in thinking about life and death? What values are evident in a yearning for immortality? The lines of discussion raised throughout the course are regularly as provocative as these, and Professor Grim means them to be exactly that.
"The purpose of the lectures," he notes, "is, first and foremost, to open issues for thoughtful consideration ... [to] give an appreciation for the complex concepts that lie just beneath our everyday patterns of evaluation, and for some of the bold and insightful reflections that can illuminate them.
"The student can expect to finish the course with some new and interesting answers, and a command of important philosophical arguments and approaches, but also with some new and interesting questions about values."
[hide=Course Lecture Titles][list][*]1. Questions of Value
[*]2. Facts and Values
[*]3. Lives to Envy, Lives to Admire
[*]4. Foundations of Ethics—Theories of the Good
[*]5. Foundations of Ethics—Theories of the Right
[*]6. Thoughts on Religion and Values
[*]7. Life’s Priorities
[*]8. The Cash Value of a Life
[*]9. How Do We Know Right from Wrong?
[*]10. Cultures and Values—Questions of Relativism
[*]11. Cultures and Values—Hopi, Navajo, and Ik
[*]12. Evolution, Ethics, and Game Theory
[*]13. The Objective Side of Value
[*]14. Better Off Dead
[*]15. A Picture of Justice
[*]16. Life’s Horrors
[*]17. A Genealogy of My Morals
[*]18. Theories of Punishment
[*]19. Choice and Chance
[*]20. Free Will and Determinism
[*]21. Images of Immortality
[*]22. Ethical Knowledge, Rationality, and Rules
[*]23. Moralities in Conflict and in Change
[*]24. Summing Up
[/list][/hide]
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