Practical Ethics for Businesses and Individuals

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.