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Course Info for FORG - 281 - 01, Fall 2025
Class number: 3532 Title: Morality & Markets Department: Formal Organizations
Career: Undergraduate Component: Seminar Session: Regular
Instructor's Permission Required: No Grading Basis: Regular Units: 1.00
Enrollment limited to 18 Current enrollment: 19 Available seats: 0
Start date: Tuesday, September 2, 2025 End date: Wednesday, December 17, 2025 Mode of Instruction: In Person
Schedule: MWF: 10:00AM-10:50AM, HHN - 105 Instructor(s): Alcorn, John
Prerequisite(s): None
Distribution Requirement: Meets Social Sciences Requirement
Course Description:
An introduction to moral issues that markets and firms present. Markets and firms tend to foster mutual benefit, efficiency, consumer sovereignty, and entrepreneurship. But they can also foster greed, deleterious competition, negative spillovers, disruption, commodification, vice, self-defeating consumerism, and inequality. And they can either involve or dissolve discrimination, corruption, and coercion. We will examine and weigh these phenomena with interdisciplinary social-science and moral criteria from psychology, philosophy, and theology. The course pedagogy is ‘academic coaching.’ Tutorials during office hours will prepare you to lead classes with presentations, debates, and roundtables. You will also do a research project. The seminar will equip you to make up your own mind about fraught issues, in light of key concepts and evidence, and through civil discourse and debate.