Thursday, November 16, 2017

Studying Ethics

I might have mentioned a few days ago that I'm signing up for next semester's classes pretty soon. One of the classes I'm thinking of taking is a class on ethics. I really enjoyed that section of my Intro to Philosophy class, and I think I'd like to spend a few months asking myself difficult, ethical questions and trying to determine what's the right thing to do and why it's the right thing to do.

Of course, we do something similar fairly frequently. We often have to make difficult, ethical choices, and we sometimes have to study them out in our minds to determine the best course of action. Those situations test our knowledge of ethics in much the way an ethics class would, I imagine. We are given a textbook in the form of scriptures and the words of prophets, we can study the problems out and seek confirmation from the Spirit similar to how we can seek help from a tutor, and after we make our choice, we will get feedback from out Instructor, whether that means getting a good grade or a bad one.

In this sense, everyone should study ethics. We don't necessarily need to know what ancient philosophers thought about what was right or wrong, but we should certainly try to figure out right and wrong for ourselves (with a lot of help from God, of course). It may be one of the most important subjects one can study. We each have a very good reason to study ethics and try to learn how to behave ethically: There's a lot more at stake for each of us than our GPAs. We owe it to ourselves to learn how to make good ethical decisions, and I'm looking forward to spending a few months next year exploring what that means.

No comments: