Seminar III
The Ethics of Family, Work and Citizenship
If Pacific Seminars I and II are designed to lead students to ask questions about various dimensions of the Good Society, Pacific Seminar III invites them to consider their own lives and how they might contribute to a Good Society.
Pacific Seminar III has been developed to offer senior students an opportunity to reflect on their moral and intellectual development and to anticipate their lives as responsible leaders in their careers and communities.
In particular, Pacific Seminar III helps students refine the tools needed for addressing the moral issues they will face in their lives after college.
The course focuses students’ attention on what their moral values are, what approaches they use to deal with moral problems, and what overall moral outlooks they maintain.
In addressing each of these questions, students will be lead to ask how their moral outlooks have been formed and developed.
Pacific Seminar III attempts to be both retrospective and prospective.
Students are exposed to important theories of moral development as part of their reflections on how they have come to their current situation.
Students are also called upon to imagine their future lives in families, as friends, in their careers, and as members of civic communities.
What challenges can they expect to face? What resources do they believe they will need to be, as the University Mission Statement puts it, responsible leaders?
Students begin the course writing their own moral and intellectual autobiographies.
With the introduction of Pacific’s e-portfolio, students will have access to archives of work they have done as Pacific students to enable their reflections on their intellectual development.
These autobiographies provide a baseline for the students’ reflections throughout the course.
The course then moves to consider the nature of moral values and to help students identify their own moral values and consider how those could be applied within the university community.
Students also consider typical paradigms of moral choice and study the moral theories that underlie them.
Another course assignment in the course is a project in which each student selects biographies or autobiographies of a remarkable person.
After reading the biography or autobiography, each student will write an essay and make a class presentation.
The point of this assignment is to use the subject of the biography or autobiography as a case study.
Students ask how their subjects developed their moral outlooks, including their values and their approaches to dealing with moral problems.
The emphasis on using various kinds of stories or narratives to facilitate reflection includes viewing and reflecting upon movies that reflect key moral issues.
Students write reflections on at least two movies that they have viewed as part of the course.
At the end of the course, students write reconsiderations of their own autobiographies in light of what they have learned in Pacific Seminar III.
Pacific Seminar III is taught in individual sections of 25 students.
The course uses a common textbook and a reader developed for the course.
Individual instructors bring their own strengths to the course, especially in the selection of movies and in the practical examples and in-class exercises used in the course.
