By Kamryn Anthis | Staff Writer
The Honors College and College of Arts and Sciences are collaborating to offer students a new major focused entirely on ethics, designed for high-achieving students interested in leadership, human flourishing and morality.
This new ethics major will be housed within a Bachelor of Philosophy degree and will accept only 10 students per cohort. The intentionally small program will allow students to develop close relationships with faculty while engaging with questions of morality across different disciplines.
Philosophy department chair Dr. Todd Buras said the major is distinctive because students will study ethics through both philosophical and Christian perspectives.
“Ethics as a subject matter is a branch of philosophy, and it’s typically done in a very secular frame,” Buras said. “What’s unique about Baylor is not only that we’re willing to advise students to study ethics, but also to be prepared to look at the same topics from a theological point of view, in fact, from a Christian point of view.”
Buras said Christian perspectives on ethics will be an important part of the major, but students will also engage with other ethical traditions and questions.
“Christians have very distinct claims about the ethical life,” Buras said. “For example, the sum and total of our obligations is to love God and love neighbor. And those are really distinct, ethical claims.”
Honors College Dean Dr. Douglas Henry said Baylor has long offered courses that engage students with questions of ethics, but the new major brings those courses together into a dedicated program.
“It’s not new for Baylor to provide students with coursework and curriculum grounded in the expertise of our faculty in ethics,” Henry said. “It is new to aggregate a set of courses in a thoughtful way around those questions and provide a specifically defined major in ethics.”
Buras said the creation of an ethics major is unusual even outside of Baylor and reflects a willingness to approach questions of right and wrong through academic study.
“It’s a new thing in Baylor to have an ethics major,” Buras said. “And it’s a fairly rare thing to have an ethics major, and I think it’s a really good thing, and it shows that Baylor’s prepared to do something that’s really pretty quite countercultural, which is to maintain that you can answer questions about right and wrong and good and bad in a disciplined way, in a way that reflects more serious academic study.”
This major will be intentionally selective, accepting only 10 students to each cohort. Henry said the program is designed for students willing to engage deeply with difficult questions rather than simply look for easy answers.
“The intention is for it to be appealing to students of high academic aspirations and a willingness to ask really demanding, challenging questions about what is just and what is morally praiseworthy,” Henry said.
Students will apply to make ethics their primary major under the Bachelor of Philosophy degree. Henry said the small cohort will allow students to work closely with faculty as they navigate questions that have challenged scholars for generations.
“The target student is someone who’s willing to work really hard at questions that have, in some cases, proven to have elusive answers for lots of really smart people. And so by design, it’ll be small,” Henry said.
Rather than preparing students for one specific profession, Burus said the goal of this major is to create students who can go out into the world and handle situations with reason and wisdom. Students will not be taught right and wrong, but how to assess circumstances in any field or area of life.
“One of the most remarkable things about the whole topic of ethics is that it pervades human life in every profession,” Buras said. “I don’t think it’s really tied to a single professional path. I think to be prepared for leadership in any path. You need to be able to engage the norms.”
Through the program, students will study ethical theories and examine how those theories apply to real-world situations and disagreements.
“Students will learn to take a well-reasoned stand in communities, [have] a great conversation about the moral evaluation of human conduct, and they will acquire the moral vocabulary required to do that,” Buras said. “… The goal is really to prepare you to take a stand in an ongoing debate about what is right and wrong and good affairs.”
Buras said the major could also give students the tools to approach disagreements with greater reason and understanding.
“I think our major will help show that we can do more than just fight each other, politically and otherwise; we can reason together,” Buras said.
