Course Description

What is ethics, really?

Ethics is often imagined as a matter of abstract rules or dramatic moral dilemmas. Yet much of ethical life unfolds in the ordinary rhythms of everyday existence—in how we care for others, navigate relationships, share public spaces, respond to difference, balance competing values, and imagine what a good life might look like.

This course takes an anthropological approach to ethics, exploring how moral life is lived, negotiated, and transformed across diverse social and cultural worlds. Through ethnographic research, films, and discussion, we will explore how moral worlds are shaped through relationships with family members, strangers, communities, and institutions. We will also consider encounters with non-human others—including animals, unseen beings, and emerging technologies—and ask how such relationships challenge and expand our moral horizons. Along the way, we will examine the role of moral imagination: the human capacity to engage ethically, creatively, and flexibly with the challenges of life, and to envision alternative ways of living with others.

A central component of the course is a collaborative video essay project that combines fieldwork, storytelling, and analysis. Conducting your own research in Hong Kong, you will investigate ethical questions in real-world contexts and bring course concepts into conversation with everyday lived experience. By the end of the course, you will have developed new ways of recognising ethical life in the world around you, critically examining moral assumptions, and imagining alternative possibilities for living together in a changing world.

Course Learning Outcomes

On completing the course, students will be able to:

1. Apply anthropological concepts and frameworks to identify, describe, and interpret diverse dynamics of everyday ethical life across various cultures, societies, and contexts.
2. Critically analyse how moral spheres are constituted by those we recognise as ethically significant, and how the boundaries of these spheres may expand or contract in different historical and social contexts.
3. Explain how human interactions with diverse non-human others demonstrate moral imagination and reveal the range of ethical innovations and challenges that arise at the borders of the human.
4. Demonstrate a broadened and deepened understanding of moral life – encompassing their own moral intuitions and local moral worlds as well as those of others.
5. Create a video essay that critically and creatively explores a dimension of everyday ethics and moral life in Hong Kong, combining narrative and visual storytelling.

Offer Semester and Day of Teaching

Second semester (Wed)

Study Load

Assessment: 100% coursework

Required Reading

• Akyab Dargye (2021) ‘Black Yak’, trans. H. Gayley and T. Dorjee, Yeshe: A Journal of Tibetan Literature, Arts and Humanities, 1(1). Available at: https://yeshe.org/black-yak/ (Accessed: 15 June 2026).
• Barstow, G. (trans.) (2021) ‘A Case for Animal Compassion: Introduction to and Translation of Khenpo Tsultrim Lodrö’s “Words to Increase Virtue”’, in Barstow, G. (ed.) Voices from Larung Gar: Shaping Tibetan Buddhism for the Twenty-First Century. Boulder: Shambhala Publications. pp. 
• Bloom, P. (2016) ‘Chapter 1: Other People’s Shoes’, in Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. New York: Ecco.
• Das, V. (2012) ‘Ordinary Ethics’, in Fassin, D. (ed.) A Companion to Moral Anthropology. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 133–149.
• Jamyang Kyi (2015 [2013]) ‘Coerced Vegetarianism and the Welfare of Tibetans’. Available at: https://highpeakspureearth.com/coerced-vegetarianism-and-the-welfare-of-tibetans-by-jamyang-kyi-2/ (Accessed: 15 June 2026).
• Keane, W. (2025) Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Required reading: Introduction; Chapter 3, ‘Near-Humans: Animals as Prey, Sacrifice, Workmates and Companions’; Chapter 4, ‘Quasi-Humans: Robots, Avatars, Servants and Fetishes’; and Chapter 5, ‘Superhumans: Artificial Intelligence, Spirits and Shamans’.
• Lambek, M. (2010) ‘Introduction’, in Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 1–29.
• Mattingly, C. (2012) ‘Two Virtue Ethics and the Anthropology of Morality’, Anthropological Theory, 12(2), pp. 161–184.
• Singer, P. (1981) ‘Expanding the Circle of Ethics’, in The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 111–124.

Course Co-ordinator and Teacher(s)