Course Description

Ethics is often imagined as a matter of grand dilemmas or abstract rules. But ethical life is also woven into the fabric of the everyday—in the choices we make, the people and beings we care for, and the ways we relate to others across lines of difference. This course invites students to think deeply about the ethical dimensions of ordinary life, asking how we experience, express, and negotiate moral concerns in diverse social and cultural contexts. We will explore how individuals and communities use their moral imagination—the human capacity to respond ethically, creatively, and flexibly—to navigate dilemmas, question inherited norms, and envision more just or compassionate futures.

Drawing on anthropology, psychology, philosophy and literature, we will examine how ethical perspectives shift over time and across cultures, how certain beings come to be seen as “moral others,” and how empathy, care, and conflict animate moral change. In the second half of the course, we turn to the moral challenges posed by encounters with non-human others—including animals, unseen beings, and machines—and explore how these relationships stretch our moral horizons.

Students will bring theory into conversation with lived experience through a collaborative video essay project combining fieldwork, storytelling, and analysis to explore ethical questions. By the end of the course, they will have a toolkit for critically and imaginatively engaging with ethical life and a deeper understanding of how moral boundaries are shaped, challenged, and reimagined in our 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

Below is a provisional list. A more tailored list will be made available.

Selections from:

• Barker, J. (Ed.). (2007). The Anthropology of Morality in Melanesia and Beyond. London: Ashgate.
• Bloom, P. Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion.
• Bornstein, E., & Redfield, P. (Eds.). (2010). Forces of Compassion: Humanitarianism Between Ethics and Politics. Santa Fe: SAR Press.
• Das, V. (2007). Life and Words: Violence and the Descent Into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Das, V. (2012). Ordinary Ethics. In D. Fassin (Ed.), A Companion to Moral Anthropology. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Das, V. 92015). What Does Ordinary Ethics Look Like. In M. Lambek, et. al., Four Lectures on Ethics. Chicago: HAU Books.
• Dave, N. N. (2012). Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics. Durham NC: Duke University Press.
• Elisha, O. (2011). Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Fassin, D. (2011). Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Fassin, D., & Lézé, S. (Eds.). (2013). Moral Anthropology: A Critical Reader (1st ed.). London; New York: Routledge.
• Heintz, M. (2009). The Anthropology of Moralities. New York, NY: Berghahn Books.
• Keane, W. (2015). Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories. Princeton University.
• Keane, W. (2025). Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination. Princeton University.
• Kleinman, A, et. al. (2011). Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Laidlaw, J. (1995). Riches and Renunciation: Religion, Economy, and Society Among the Jains. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Laidlaw, J. (2014). Significant Differences. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4(1), 497-506.
• Lambek, M. (2010). Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. New York: Fordham University Press. [Especially both chapters by Lambek, and one by Das]
• Lambek, M. (2015). On the Immanence of the Ethical: A Response to Lempert’s “No Ordinary Ethics”. Anthropological Theory, 15, 128-132.
• Lempert, M. (2013). No Ordinary Ethics. Anthropological Theory, 13(4), 370-393.
• Nussbaum, M. C. (1995). Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life.
• Nussbaum, M. C. (2001). The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge University Press.
• Pandian, A., & Ali, D. (Eds.). (2010). Ethical Life in South Asia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Schielke, S., & Debevec, L. (Eds). (2012). Ordinary Lives and Grand Schemes: An Anthropology of Everyday Religion. Oxford: Berghahn.
• Singer, P. (1981). The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress.
• Stafford, C. (2013). Ordinary Ethics in China. A&C Black.
• Sulkin, L., & David, C. (2012). People of Substance: An Ethnography of Morality in the Colombian Amazon. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Sykes, K. M. (Ed.). (2009). Ethnographies of Moral Reasoning: Living Paradoxes of a Global Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Williams, B. (1993). Shame and Necessity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Zigon, J. (2014). An Ethics of Dwelling and a Politics of World-Building: A Critical Response to Ordinary Ethics. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 20(4), 746-64.

Course Co-ordinator and Teacher(s)