This course aims to equip students with conceptual and theoretical frameworks to understand, explain, and critique those contemporary social issues and policies that are often regarded as morally questionable, confusing, contentious, and even diverse. These frameworks will be drawn from fields such as political philosophy, social theory, cultural studies, moral psychology, and history. The course will focus on concrete case studies of issues such as the regulation of sex work, LGBTQIA+ politics, gambling and other additions, drug trafficking, and the death penalty, and the censorship of pornography. By engaging deeply with these and other issues through discussion-based seminars, students will acquire the knowledge, skills, and predispositions required to make sense of what is today a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. Students will become more discerning and critical consumers and producers of media.