There are many questions of fact and finance in our lives. Which investment has the highest return? The house is in a school district. What will this candidate do if elected? The really. It’s fundamental. Professor Patrick Grim says that questions of our lives are not questions of fact or finance. They are questions. There is value. . The deep questions apply to every aspect of our lives.

What does it give? It is genuine. What is the value? What are the things worth trying for? What makes life worth living? There are values that are different from each other. Is it possible to have ethical values without religion? How can there be real choice if the universe operates in deterministic laws? Is value subjective? We can ask if life is worth living, or if we would be better off in certain situations. The person is dead. .

There are questions of value. It is a course for anyone who has ever felt the tug of such questions or who wants to fine-tune their ability to see how deeper questions of ethics and values apply to the choices that make up their lives.

Professor Grim has placed the accent on individual choice and has not shied away from controversy in presenting this philosophical examination of the range of decisions we all encounter as we live our lives. The issues he presents for your examination cover evolution and ethics, about whether punishment is justified by retribution or by deterrence, and about the different lessons drawn from life’s worst horrors by both religious and anti religious traditions.

What are the values involved in thinking about life and death? What values can be seen in a desire for immortality? Professor Grim says the lines of discussion raised throughout the course are provocative.

The purpose of the lectures is to give an appreciation for the complex concepts that lie just beneath our everyday patterns of evaluation, and for some of the bold and insightful reflections that can illuminate them.

The student can expect to finish the course with some new and interesting answers, and a command of important philosophical arguments and approaches, but also with some new and interesting questions about values.

A challenge to look in the opposite direction.

The course is designed to facilitate reflective thought, not to end debate, but to open it. The unexamined life is not worth living. The tools needed for examining the values that guide our lives can be found in this course.

Professor Grim has published in a wide range of disciplines, from theoretical biology to artificial intelligence and computer science.

He returned to his interest in values with these lectures. He uses his award-winning teaching skills to draw on almost every expression of human endeavor, bringing to life not only the fundamental questions of the course but the insights gleaned by the thinkers and artists who have grappled with those same questions for thousands of years.

He casts a net. History. , beginning with Herodotus and running through usury in feudalism’s seignorial system right up through more contemporary subjects such as the cases of Patty Hearst and John W. Hinckley. The economics are theoretical. Also makes an appearance. There is a game theory. From John von Neumann to Robert Axelrod. He looked into both. There is a theoretical biology. And. Sociobiology is related to it. Through the work of Richard Dawkins and E. O. Wilson. There is more to come. There is physics. As quantum mechanics is used to discuss determinism. There are aspects of his discussion of relativism. anthropology An exploration of the role of rules in our lives draws on this. psychology They looked at the work of Jean and Lawrence.

Scientists are not the only ones who have their work force them to consider their values. The questions we ask and the answers we seek figure prominently in the work of many writers. John Ford made a classic western film. Liberty Valance was shot by a man. It is added to the mix.

Professor Grim makes sure that every concept addressed in a later lecture has been clearly introduced earlier in the course. Even the most nuanced material is clear in his presentation.

There is a range of tools to make complex concepts clear.

Professor Grim has put together a course in which concepts are animated through both vivid examples drawn from real life and equally vivid thought experiments.

The evil demon of Descartes is what inspired one of those thought experiments. There are meditations. It is further developed in the work of both Robert Nozick and Hilary Putnam. The Matrix is a movie. There are films. Professor Grim posed the question of whether one would accept a choice of pushing a button that would give everyone a nice, but virtual, life.

Two examples Professor Grim uses to discuss the question of whether values are objective or subjective are this particular thought experiment and G. E. Moore’s famous one of imagining a universe containing nothing but the single thing you wish to evaluate. The clarity they bring to the subject is remarkable.

Professor Grim recalls the story of the Ford Pinto, built with a rear-mounted gas tank, which was likely to explode in a collision. At least 500 burn deaths resulted, and many lawsuits were brought against the Ford Motor Company, bringing to light what some might consider the cold-blooded cost-benefit analysis of human worth that the Ford company had used to make its design decisions.

The analysis is one of the main points of Professor Grim’s discussion of the cash value of a human life and the ways people have tried to put an actual value on something most people are tempted to say has infinite value.

The choices made by Ford are the subject of a fascinating discussion. kinds It is evident in our decisions as individuals and as a society.

Professor Grim says that values for beings like us are inescapable, but that we want our values to be right. It is a reflection. Values are inescapable because of the particular values we have and for beings like us.

John Dewey warns that an inquiry of ideas, like every other real exploration, is intellectually dangerous.

Once you start to think critically about ideas, you can no longer be certain of your conclusions.