University of Kansas, Spring 2004
Philosophy 160: Introduction to Ethics
Ben Eggleston—eggleston@ku.edu

Writing assignment on applied ethics

The third part of our course is devoted to an examination of several issues in applied ethics. Our examination of these issues takes place mainly through the reading of scholarly articles on various topics, such as famine relief, euthanasia, and abortion. Your assignment is to select a single ethically significant sentence from one of these articles and to write a paper, not more than five pages long, developing the most effective objection to it that you can.

In order to succeed on this assignment, you must understand that you will be graded not only on the effectiveness of your objection, but also on the ethical significance of the claim that you are critiquing. What I mean by ethical significance has two aspects:

1. ethical significance: You must be sure that the claim you are critiquing is in the subject matter of moral philosophy, not (e.g.) zoology, physiology, economics, etc. So, for example, if an author says that the cost of famine relief is less than you think it is, this may be an economically significant claim; or if an author says that fetuses are viable at some other time than when you think they’re viable, this may be a physiologically significant claim. But neither of these is an ethically significant claim, since none of them actually says anything about ethics. An ethically significant claim would be a claim that a certain kind of behavior or policy is right or wrong, or that certain individuals have or do not have certain rights, or that people in certain circumstances have or do not have certain obligations or duties, etc.
2. ethical significance: You must also be sure that the claim you are critiquing is significant, not minor or trivial. For example, suppose an author were to say that he thinks that people have the right to 2,000 calories of nutrition per day, and you were to think that people really only have the right to 1,950 calories of nutrition per day. Then while your disagreement with the author would be an ethical one (because it would be concerned with the extent of the rights that people have), it would not be a very significant one, because even if the author were to concede this point, it wouldn’t have a substantial impact on the practical implications of his or her views.

That’s the gist of what I mean by ethical significance. Along with what I said about the effectiveness of your objection, this means that in choosing a claim to critique, you must strike a balance between (1) choosing a claim that is easy to refute, but that is also quite ethically trivial, and (2) choosing a claim that is undeniably ethically significant, but that is also very hard to refute.

In order to fulfill the two main requirements of this assignment, you should structure your paper in the following way.

1. Describe the ethical claim that will be the object of your critique. This could probably be done in a short opening paragraph.
2. Explain why this claim is significant. You might explain, for example, that if the claim with which you’re concerned turns out to be objectionable, then there will turn out to be problems with one of the author’s main arguments. This could probably be done in a page or so.
3. Explain why the claim you have identified, and whose significance you have established, is objectionable. This will require the most work, and should occupy the bulk of your paper.

No paragraph should be involved in more than one of the three tasks listed above, though tasks 2 and, no doubt, 3 may require more than one paragraph to execute. Whenever a paragraph break is also the beginning of the execution of one of the tasks on this list, begin the next paragraph with the number of the task you’re beginning, like this. (That will help keep you on track and aid your teaching assistant in seeing what you’re up to at any point in your paper.)

1.    In “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Peter Singer makes many controversial claims. One of these is that whenever it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, . . .

One mistake to avoid is attempting a general or sweeping criticism of any author’s whole system of thought. For although such a paper would obviously have no trouble with the “significance” criterion, it would surely falter on the “effectiveness” criterion, since there is no way to effectively launch such a broad attack on an author in a five-page paper. The opposite sort of mistake, of course, is to offer a criticism of something so minute or peripheral that it lacks significance. The demands of significance and effectiveness tend to oppose each other; so, as I said above, part of your job is to strike a balance between the two.

Your paper should have the same header information as specified for the writing assignment on normative ethics. The other remarks on formatting, style, and content apply here as well, except where obviously inapplicable due the different nature of this assignment. The rules regarding academic misconduct are also the same as before: you are free to get all sorts of help on this assignment, as long as you (1) do all the writing yourself and (2) cite whatever help you get. This means, among other things, the following:

• When formulating your ideas, you are free to consult whatever sources you want to consult. You must, however, indicate all of the sources (books, journal articles, World Wide Web pages, television programs, other people, or whatever) that helped you to develop your ideas for the paper. You will not be penalized for borrowing others’ good ideas instead of thinking of your own; the ideas in your paper will be judged on their quality and how well you adapt them to the purpose of your paper, not on whether they are original with you.
• When writing your paper, do the writing yourself. Any language not your own—whether a sentence from a published source or just a clever phrase or metaphor suggested by another person in conversation—must be attributed to its source. Again, you will not be penalized for borrowing others’ good ways of expressing certain ideas, unless you borrow so much that the paper ceases to be legitimately yours. But as long as the paper is not flooded with quotations (i.e., as long as it’s plainly a piece of your writing), the writing will be judged on its quality (especially its clarity), and not on whether it’s all original with you.
• To cite a source of ideas or language you are borrowing, use a clear system of citations, such as footnotes, endnotes, or parenthetical references like those recommended in the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers or Kate L. Turabian’s A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations. There is no particular format for citations to which it is necessary to conform exactly, as long as your citations are clear and exhibit a consistent form throughout your paper.

So those are some comments about what is expected on this assignment. Grading will be based on these considerations; to be more precise, your grade will be determined by the following five criteria (assuming no penalties for lateness, plagiarism, etc.):

1. (10 percent:) task 1, above
2. (20 percent:) task 2, above
3. (50 percent:) task 3, above
4. (10 percent:) Your paper is written in a clear, straightforward, grammatically correct style.
5. (10 percent:) Your paper is properly formatted.

Your paper will be due in class at 2:30 p.m. on Monday, May 3, and will determine 10 percent, or possibly 14 percent, of your overall course grade. (See the syllabus for a reminder of how assignments’ weights will be determined.) This assignment, however, is optional in the following sense: if you do not do it, then your grade for this assignment will be whatever grade you get on the test on applied ethics on Monday, May 10.