Contemporary Moral Philosophy                First Paper Assignment        Due: Monday, March 16 by 10 am

Basic assignment: Write a 5-8 page (typed, double-spaced) paper explaining and supporting your position on some issue raised by one or more of the writers we have read (or will have read) in the first few weeks of this course..

Some guidelines:

1. Your paper should contain your thoughts and opinions, not just a summary of Marx or Marcuse (or whoever).  Tell me what you think, not just what other people have said.
2. Do, however, address the position and the arguments of at least one of the philosophers we have studied.  Give references to the texts to support your interpretation of their views.
3. Be sure that the question or issue your paper is addressing is clear and well focused.
4. Be sure that you have provided a clear statement of your position on that issue (or your answer to that question).
5. In addition to explaining what you think, your paper should contain reasons why you take the position you do.  Your main job is to explain why a reasonable person should agree with the opinion or position you are expressing.
6. Include in your paper at least one statement of an objection to your view and a reply to that objection.  How might someone who disagreed with you criticize your argument?  And how can you respond to that criticism?
7. You are not required (or encouraged) to consult any other sources besides those already assigned for class reading.  If you do use any other sources, give them credit for whatever you take from them: list them in a bibliography at the end of your paper and give specific references for any ideas you have borrowed. 
8. Save your paper as a Word doc and send it to me attached to an email by the due date and time indicated above.

Some possible topics (if you want to develop a different topic, check it out with me before you write your paper):

1. Marx and Nietzsche each offers a fairly sweeping condemnation of what he takes to be the philosophical tradition.  Either:
1. Compare the various grounds on which these two thinkers criticize/reject the traditional problems/methods/concepts of philosophy. Or,
2. Consider one or two of these critiques in more detail.  Are the reasons given sufficient to justify rejecting the tradition (or some aspect of it)?
2. Each of these writers also represents a way forward for philosophy (or perhaps a successor activity to philosophy).  Either:
1. Compare the Marxian idea of a ‘critical social theory’ to Nietzschean ‘genealogy.’. Or,
2. Consider one of these in more detail. 
3. Discuss alienation, or fetishism, or reification or some combination of the three as critical concepts.  Can we make sense of it (them)? Do they offer any illumination or insight?  Can you think of examples?
4. Does Marcuse succeed in drawing a meaningful distinction between true and false needs?  If not, can such a distinction be drawn in some other way?
5. If we consider feminism as a critical theory, is it more like Marxian class analysis or more like Nietzschean genealogy?
6. Is an “ethic of care” needed to correct the male bias of mainstream moral theory?  Or does this approach to ethics amount to an acceptance of gender stereotypes?
7. Catherine MacKinnon argues that the ‘objectivity’ and ‘neutrality’ of our moral practices and our political institutions (especially the law) are illusory:  they reflect a ‘male’ point of view.  The kind of political and moral theories that she call ‘liberal,’ therefore, also reflect this gendered point of view and rationalize male dominance.  Explain and assess her analysis.