Why an Ethics, Values & Professional Life Minor at Le Moyne College?

The Ethics, Values and Professional Life minor helps students set their personal and professional goals in an ethically informed way. Students will learn how to think about questions of values, responsibilities, and virtues as they appear in a variety of real life contexts and professional fields. The goal is for students to live more meaningful, ethically sound, and professionally fulfilling lives.

How Will You Benefit from the Ethics Minor?

Students

Students from all majors can benefit from the Ethics minor. While ethical issues arise in every domain of life, many of the challenges that we face today originate in professional contexts. Studying the ethical issues that arise in medicine, business, technology, engineering, and so forth will help you become a better, more innovative and values-driven professional. The minor will also provide resume differentiation. With this credential, you will distinguish yourself from others and signal to potential employers that you have developed skills integrating professional knowledge with ethical awareness. Finally, your ethics education will help you think about how your career fits into your life as a whole, your community, and society at large.

What Will You Learn in the Ethics Minor?

Student researchers

The Ethics Minor includes courses that focus on a variety of professional and personal questions. New courses are continually being developed based on student interests and needs. Recent courses include Ethics of Medical Technology, Ethics and Public Policy, Environmental Ethics, Happiness and Meaning in Life, and Crisis Ethics: War, Pandemic, and Social Collapse. Examples of the sorts of questions you will consider are:

  • How can scarce resources be distributed fairly? 
  • Should business decisions be guided by anything other than profit? 
  • How important is patient consent?
  • Do animals have rights? 
  • How much risk is acceptable in designing a system? 
  • How do you weigh the survival of an ecosystem against human interests?
  • Should there be any limits on personal privacy? 
  • Should I blow the whistle on my boss? 
  • What do I owe my friends, family, and colleagues? 
  • Must your career make you happy? 
  • What are possible sources of meaning in life? 

By completing the minor, you will be able to:

  • Identify ethical concerns that arise in a variety of professional settings, such as medicine, business, technology, and engineering 
  • Understand how questions of individual meaning and social justice can be integrated into everyday decision making 
  • Identify dilemmas that result from conflicts of values and responsibilities
  • Use critical thinking skills to analyze ethical dilemmas 
  • Exercise the capacity and habits of mind for sound ethical judgment

How Can You Complete the Ethics Minor?

Since it builds on Core requirements, the Ethics minor is not difficult to complete. You will need to take three additional courses for the minor, and one of those requirements may be satisfied by taking courses in your major or the Core. Please see the course catalog for more information

NEH Logo

This minor was made possible, in part, by a Humanities Connections grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities