NEH Enduring Questions Course on Duty

FAIN: AQ-228995-15

University of Tennessee, Knoxville (Knoxville, TN 37916-3801)
Urmila Shree Seshagiri (Project Director: September 2014 to March 2018)

The development and teaching of a new undergraduate course on duty.

This course offers a fresh view of moral life in which concepts of duty, rather than rights and entitlements, occupy center stage. The course goals are (1) to understand multiple conceptions of duty and (2) to debate the value of duty as a force in our lives. To whom do human beings owe duty, and how do religious principles, legal bodies, and social institutions compel dutiful actions? Eastern and Western literary and philosophical texts -- from The Ramayana to A Few Good Men -- suggest the complex moral obligations that dwell within the family and the state, the experience of war, the condition of suffering, and the creation of art.