Learn 2024

Dear Students,

Welcome to this exciting and dynamic core module: Advanced Public Sector Financial Management (PADM8WO) offered in Semester 1 of this year.

The module focuses on all pertinent aspects of government finance in a South African, regional and global context.

I will be taking you through the finer details of the module in classes which commences next week. 

Looking forward to your compulsory regular attendance and active participation in the module.

Best wishes

Prof Subban 

This section will cover a variety of areas, from how to recognise, analyse, and construct good arguments, to how to critically assess information you’re given. We will learn about common fallacies of reasoning, and how to identify arguments, as well as different types of arguments, and how to evaluate them. You will also learn how to construct strong arguments of your own. Finally, we will look at various arguments from the news and other sources, and learn how to tell whether they are reliable or not.

This part of the module introduces the student to moral reasoning about contemporary practical issues.  It further encourages thinking about how morality intersects with our political views.

One interesting intersection between morality and practical issues is how civil law is designed to mirror the values of the society it serves but that the values themselves are mostly multifarious and often stand at odds with each other in the same society. In short, moral truth appears to be at least culturally relativised if not subject relative, whereas legal truth presents as objective or absolute. This means it is rationally impossible for the law to reflect moral values.

Students will investigate meta-ethical arguments about moral realism and anti-realism in order to understand the philosophical underpinnings of moral relativism. Is moral relativism true, or are there objective moral facts? The module will then turn to an introductory discussion of laws around corporal punishment in South Africa and the empirical basis for having banned all forms of corporal punishment.

The module asks the student to consider whether this absolute ruling against corporeal punishment is in violation of the subjective and cultural mores about child rearing in South Africa.