Ethical Inquiry Position Paper Assignment

Due dates: June 15 (Topic statement); July 6 (Rough draft); August 3 (final version)

Basic assignment: Write a 5-7 page paper in which you explain and support your position on one of the ethical issues discussed in our applied ethics text. Include some discussion of what kind of thinking leads you to your conclusions. (See #6 below.)

Some Explanations and Guidelines

1. Students sometimes have difficulty grasping the kind of paper I am asking you to write.

a. It is not a research paper. You do not need to read anything but the assigned class readings. (In some cases I will recommend that you read other pertinent articles from our text.)

b. I am asking you to express your own personal opinion (something you may have been taught to regard as too subjective or as inappropriate for academic work). But I am also asking you to subject your opinion to a careful, critical examination before you express it. You may find that your opinion changes in the course of this examination. In particular, I want you to examine carefully the arguments and reasons offered by those whose opinions are opposed to your own, and to show in your paper that you have given those reasons and arguments a fair hearing.

c. I will be evaluating your paper primarily by assessing how clearly you state your position and the reasoning behind it; how alert you are to the variety of possible alternatives and objections to your position that might come from other ethical perspectives; how accurately you have explained the arguments of those who disagree with you; and how cogent and thorough your replies to those arguments are.. I will not be judging your paper on the basis of my opinion about the correctness of your position.

2. Taking a position is not the same thing (necessarily) as taking a side. You may find yourself wanting to stake out a "middle ground" position. Or your position may be that no definite opinion on the topic can be adequately defended. Any position is O.K. as long as it is clearly explained and carefully reasoned.

3. Be sure to state your position clearly. Even if you are uncertain or ambivalent, explain carefully the nature of and reasons for your uncertainty or ambivalence. Be sure to make clear to your reader what question(s) you are trying to answer. [Here, for example, are six different questions connected with the topic of euthanasia: Is an ill or disabled person ever better off dead? If a person believes that he or she would be better off dead, are they justified in taking their own life? If a person wishes his or her life to end as quickly as possible, is another person ever justified in actively or passively hastening their death? Even if it is sometimes permissible for one person to hasten another's death by withholding life-prolonging treatment, can it ever be justifiable to actively kill someone? Even if it is sometimes justifiable for one person to kill another (in order to relieve their suffering), can this ever be proper for a physician, who is supposed to be working to prolong life? Even if it is a sometimes right for one person to relieve another person's suffering by killing them, is it wise to formulate explicit policies authorizing such acts under certain conditions (i.e., to legalize active euthanasia), or would it be better to keep such acts illegal? An answer to one of these questions need not determine answers to the others.]

4. Support your position, as best you can, with reasons and arguments. Try to find reasons which will have some chance of persuading those who disagree with you. (In other words, avoid "preaching to the choir", i.e., giving reasons that will only seem like good reasons to those who already agree with you.) This is hard. Do the best you can.

5. Try to explain and rebut the most important or most common objections to your position. (I am assuming that you will have encountered views opposed to your own in the readings and class discussions. It might help to remind yourself of the variety of ethical perspectives we have studied and to remember or imagine what each might say about your topic.) What will count as an adequate reply to an objection depends on what sort of objection it is. But, in general, try to explain why the objection should not convince a reasonable person to reject your view.

6. Your explanation of your position should include some account of the underlying ethical principles or values that you regard as generally important. If "underlying principles and values" doesn't seem to fit the pattern of your ethical thinking -- perhaps because you are a particularist -- try to give some sort of account of the shape or structure of your own ethical thinking. I think it might be best to do this after you have written out your thoughts about the topic at hand. Then you can look back at what you have written and see if it fits into one of the sorts of theories (or anti-theories) we have studied.

I would encourage you to be open to the possibility that you might then want to revise or supplement what you have written. For example, if you look back over your paper, and you see that all the reasons you have considered (pro and con) are basically utilitarian reasons, then you might consider whether you need to include some other sorts of arguments, based on justice or rights or backward-looking reasons or care or whatever.

Topic statement (due June 15): In addition to selecting an issue, your topic statement should include a tentative statement of your position on the issue you want to write about. Spend some time thinking about what you think and why you think it. You might want to skim through the readings on your topic to get a sense of the ‘lay of the land’. It’s fine if your position changes as you continue working on your paper.