Ethical dilemmas are a routine feature of professional life, so when you face a situation where your obligations pull in different directions, having a structured way to think through your options makes the difference between a confident, defensible decision and one you can't fully explain. In this module, you'll look at what makes a dilemma genuinely difficult, see how reasons function as the foundation for any moral choice, and work through a practical process for formulating, evaluating, and revising the moral principles that guide your decisions.

Ethical reasoning requires a vocabulary precise enough to match the situations it describes. In this module, you'll move from the fact/opinion dichotomy to the more useful descriptive/normative distinction, expand your action categories from two to three (obligatory, permissible, and prohibited), and separate moral permissibility from legal permissibility.

Knowing that a situation involves competing obligations is the starting point, not the finish line. In this module, you'll build a working knowledge of the ten categories of moral obligation, practice identifying which obligations are active in a given situation, learn how to surface the conflicts between them, and develop a method for determining which obligation carries the most weight.

You've built a robust ethical framework and now it's time to put it to work. In this module you'll test your knowledge and away with strategies to navigate moral complexity in any professional situation.