This course investigates core problems and key authors in ethical theory. The main focus of the course is to treat the rival theories of eudaimonism, deontology and utilitarianism as they are expressed both in contemporary ethical literature and in their historical context by Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill. We also give some attention to those figures that have influenced their development, such as Plato, Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Jeremy Bentham and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In the last part of the course, we turn to another alternative--the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and his influential critique of much of the Western ethical tradition that preceded him.