Contemporary Moral Philosophy               Second Paper Assignment    Due: Monday, May 4

Basic assignment: Write a 4-6 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 second half of this course.

Some guidelines:

1. Your paper should contain your thoughts and opinions, not just a summary of one or more of the writers we have read.  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. 

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

1. All-purpose formula for a topic: Choose one of the course readings.  Analyze and assess an argument (or, at least, a claim) made in that text.  (This is probably easier to do if you disagree with the claim or argument.  But it can also work to defend that claim or argument against objections that you think are misguided.)  Since this is a class in moral theory, the argument or claim that you choose should have something to do with morality (or ethics) or moral theory, broadly construed. 
   
2. Big picture topic:  We have explored a number of ‘critical theories’ (in the broad sense): Marxism, feminism, anti-colonial (or post-colonial) theory, critical race theory.  At the beginning of the semester I alleged that these theories gave us reasons to think that our sense of what is right or good or moral may be distorted (by classism, sexism, racism, colonialism, etc.).  Have we, in fact, discovered reasons of this kind?  Have these theories succeeded in ‘problematizing’ or ‘subverting’ our moral traditions?  Be as specific as you can about the concepts or values that have been called into question and why you think the “problematization is successful or unsuccessful.
   
3. Explain the philosophical upshot of Cedric Robinson’s historical explorations in Black Marxism.  What theoretical or general points can be drawn from the chapters we read?  What is the moral (what are the morals) of the historical developments that he discusses?
   
4. In her discussion of Foucault and Adorno, Amy Allen distinguishes three kinds of ‘genealogy’: subversive, vindicatory, and problematizing.  Explain the differences and examine her reasons for advocating the ‘problematizing’ form of genealogy. Does this conception of genealogy provide a better way of understanding what a critical social theory should be than the understanding that comes out of a Marxist tradition?
   
5. [This may be the same question as #4 in different words] What is the approach to critical theory that Allen extracts from the writings of Adorno and Foucault?  Is it a good one?
   
6. Why, according to Allen, do we need to give up on the notion of ‘progress as a fact’?  Is she right?
   
7. Rahel Jaeggi is trying hard to develop an understanding of moral progress that is not subject to the kinds of criticism that Amy Allen levels against other Frankfurt School critical theorists.  Does she succeed?
   
8. In her effort to ‘decolonize’ critical theory, Amy Allen advocates what she calls “metanormative contextualism”.  She claims that this approach can navigate between the opposing dangers of absolutism (or dogmatism) on the one hand and relativism on the other.  Can it?  (Is Michael Williams right to say that his ‘Wittgensteinian’ sort of contextualism, which Allen seems to endorse, is not relativism?)
   
9. Why not regard Marxism as the best framework for thinking about how to make the world a better place?
   
10.   Habermas and Forst try to articulate moral principles and grounds for those principles that seem to be intended to be universal (culture transcendent).  Do they (or does one of them) succeed?  Why or why not?