Courses @ UNIRAZAK

This course is designed to enhance students’ ability to think ethically about the means and ends of public policy. The issues confronting public decision-makers are frequently complex, involving conflicting values and strongly held preferences, incomplete and possibly unreliable information, and consequences that no one can foresee. Effectively serving the common good, then, requires that public officials exercise sound moral judgment in performing their duties – that their actions be defensible ethically as well as legally. It requires an appreciation of ethical principles and an understanding of their application in the tangled domain of public affairs. Accordingly, the course will examine normative concepts and principles that typically enter into moral reasoning and use these tools in analyzing actual cases.

• Explain the ethical assumptions underlying the responsibilities of public officials and political leaders
• Ability to identify key aspects of leadership and ethics; the resolution of conflicts between societal, organisational and individual values; and the ethics of loyalty and dissent in government.
• Propose the way in which institutional arrangements and reforms promote or inhibit moral choices, in particular some of the practical measures employed in public institutions for managing organisational integrity.
• Ability to assess norms and values in the context of contemporary government as well as in international relations through case studies grounded in current public affairs.
• Ability to identify ethical issues in public policy, analyze them through established theoretical frameworks, and relate them to specific cases in public policy.