The purpose of this assignment is to give you practice in identifying ethical theories, reconstructing them in your own words, and judging whether they are good or bad.
This is partially in:
Identify and apply a variety of epistemological, metaphysical and ethical theory;
Evaluate and differentiate between an epistemological, a metaphysical and an ethical question.
In doing this assignment, you will be practicing the skills necessary to understand various kinds of ethical reasoning, critically think about that reasoning, and learn how and when it should be applied.
Task:
In the Warburton text as well as in this module, we covered two different ethical theories:
Utilitarianism
Kantianism (Kant’s Ethical Theory)
And then we covered several problems with them. Your task is to write a short paper where you do the following:
Identify and explain ethical theory. (5pts)
Reconstruct and explain in your own words a counterexample or argument against it. (5pts)
Evaluate the argument/counterexample (tell me whether you think the argument was good or bad). (5pts)
Explain why you think that the argument/counterexample is good/bad. (5pts)
Each of these should take you around a paragraph to answer. Since this is worth 20pts, this is worth 5% of your total grade.
Submission:
To submit this assignment, I only accept .pdf, .doc, .odt, and .docx. I do not accept .pages. You can find where to submit in the upper right of this screen. As for all assignments in this class, the standard is Times New Roman, 12pt font, double spaced, 2-3 pages (that is, at least a few words onto the second page to the bottom of the third). I subtract the amount of space taken up my a header from the length of the paper.
