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These are notes for the final session of the module - mostly to do with preparing for the final assessment.
Use the weeks before the exam to write the two essays required.
Make well-designed notes. Use the synopsis technique to draw your notes up.
Choose the questions which seem easiest to you but bear in mind:
1. Don't repeat work already submitted as an essay. Err on the side of safety.
I would say if you have already written on Hume you will probably not be able to answer a question on Hume for the exam.
2. Reading.
We are interested in you developing as an independent thinker, but probably all of us need to read what experienced/brilliant philosophers have written if we are to reach satisfying/passable levels of understanding. This reading prompts us into more subtle, sophisticated thinking, and often shows how what we would think if left to ourselves is untenable. My presentations should help, but an answer which doesn't bring in any other reading will be seen as weak. At this level my suggestion is that you find one serious and challenging piece of philosophy to expound and react to in you answer. You should choose what it is, but be careful to choose something at the right level. You are looking not for opinions or claims but for arguments with which you can engage.
3. A good format is: X says this. I think this is wrong because... (Thus separating exposition and critique.)
4. Think what you are good at. Forensic analysis of an argument (q. 3,4) or constructing a discussion of a broader question (q1,6).
1. "What he [Aristotle] has to say is what will be useful to comfortable men of weak passions; but he has nothing to say to those who are possessed by a god or a devil, or whom outward misfortune drives to despair." Bertrand Russell. Fair comment?
Doctrine of the mean.
Do what comes naturally to the human being.
2. Is biology relevant to morality? If not, why not? If so, how?
Aristotle again - there is a way of life that is natural for human beings, just as there is a way of life that is natural for chickens.
Implies you should stick with what is 'natural'.
3. 'The rules of morality ... are not conclusions of our reason' - David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, Book III Part I Section I. What are Hume's arguments for this thesis? Are they sound?
The arguments here are on my webpages.
Back it up with something.
4. Do you agree with J.S.Mill that “pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends” (Mill, Utilitarianism, Ch 2)?
My webpages again supply the basics on which to build.
Tight focus on arguments as presented by Mill.
5. "Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others." Rawls, A Theory of Justice, excerpt in Sterba, p. 228. Critically evaluate this thesis.
For the adventurous.
6. Is it defensible to think that showing respect is the most important moral virtue?
We haven't discussed this. Avoid top-of-the-head stuff - bring in what you have learnt of different theories of morality. One way to structure an answer would be to consider it from the points of view of the different theories.
Spend time spelling out carefully what you think 'showing respect' means.
The concept of 'exposition' - setting out what someone else has written in an accurate neutral way.
Sentence construction. Remedy: keep it simple.
Final read-through to reduce glitches.
Revised 06:12:08 | Prepared by VP Foundations of Ethics Home page A module of the BA Philosophy programme Center for Professional Ethics | University of Central Lancashire |
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