Ethical Questions

WEEK ONE ASSIGNMENT GUIDANCE

The Purpose of This Paper

• This assignment, along with the Week Three Assignment, is intended to prepare you to write the Final Paper.

• This is not intended to be an essay, but an exercise.

• The five components of the exercise involve important skills to practice in order to be able to write the kind of coherent, well-composed philosophical essay that you will write in later papers.

Specifying the Question

Essays that address ethical issues are typically most coherent and focused when they are oriented toward answering a specific ethical question. The answer will be your “position” (in the Final Paper we’re going to call this the “thesis”), and the main body of the essay seeks to explain and justify how your position represents the best answer to the question. So it’s crucial to have a well-formulated, relevant, and focused ethical question to start with.

The list below identifies the general topic areas from which you are to decide on and formulate the specific moral question that will guide your essays, and suggests some sub-topics. It will be impossible to examine broad topics in the final paper, and so you will need to narrow down the topic as much as you possibly can. Do not attempt to address all of these topics.

Once you have decided on a topic that interests you, think of the controversies and debates, the difficult choices and dilemmas, etc., that surround this topic. Consider some very specific problem, and formulate that as a focused, concrete question. The more narrowly-focused the question, the better your paper will be.

Be sure your chosen question is itself an ethical question. An ethical question concerns what is right or wrong, what we ought or ought not to do, what kinds of things are good or bad, honest or dishonest, courageous or cowardly, generous or selfish, etc.

Ethical questions should be distinguished from questions of psychology, sociology, anthropology, biology, etc. If you are unsure, please consult your instructor.

Example 1

PHI208: WEEK ONE ASSIGNMENT GUIDANCE

Suppose you were interested in the topic of bioethics, and more specifically the topic of abortion (please note: this is not a topic that is available to you to consider, since we aren’t addressing it in class).

Overly-vague or broad questions that you would want to avoid might include:

• Is abortion moral?

• Should a woman obtain an abortion?

• Should abortions be outlawed?

Better, more-focused questions might include:

• Should abortions be allowed in certain cases, such as when the mother’s life is at risk or when a pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, but not in other cases?

• Should a women have a right to an abortion if we recognize the fetus as a person?

• Is restricting abortion rights an unjust restriction on a woman’s right to make her own reproductive choices?

Example 2

Suppose you were interested in the topic of criminal justice, and more specifically the topic of capital punishment (please note: this is not a topic that is available to you to consider, since we aren’t addressing it in class).

Overly-vague or broad questions that you would want to avoid might include:

• Is the death penalty moral?

• Should we execute people?

Better, more-focused questions might include:

• Should we execute people convicted of first-degree murder?

• Should we execute convicted murders that have mental disabilities?

• Is it just to use capital punishment when there is the possibility of executing innocent persons?

• Is the capital punishment system racist?

In order to hone your thesis to something that is manageable you will need to do research and become familiar with the topic of interest, trying to focus on a specific sub-topic within it.