Essay One Prompts - Draft for Review in Class
Requirements:
1. Your essay should be word-processed, double-spaced, one-inch to one and one-half inch margins. It should be spell-checked. Pages Numbered. Font no smaller than 12 point.
2. You should have a cover page with title, date, prompt, and your name.
3. Number each paragraph. Bold your thesis.
4. Each essay should be approximately three pages long (not including the title page or Works Consulted page).
5. You must include a Works Consulted/Cited Page. I will assume that you have read and understood Harvey, Writing with Sources on when and how to cite sources. CAREFUL AND CORRECT CITATION IS REQUIRED. WHEN IN DOUBT, CITE. Remember that simply paraphrasing or changing every third word is not OK. Quote and cite or radically summarize and cite. Use quotation marks when quoting or indent if quote is five lines or longer. Guessing at where your information comes from is not OK. Use page numbers in your in-text citations, footnotes or endnotes. Book or journal titles are italicized or underlined. You need not consult any other sources than what we have read for class. Those sources and any other sources you consult must be included in your Works Consulted/Cited and cited in-text or in footnotes/endnotes.
6. Your essay should define any key terms used, use examples to illustrate and support your argument where appropriate, and discuss likely alternatives or respond to one or more objections.
Essays will be graded for both form and content as indicated in Points to Consider in Evaluating Essays. You should use this points as one guide in proof-reading drafts of your essay.
Choose ONE of the following questions/prompts or the Wild Card:
1. HPR make distinctions between professional, social role, and personal ethics. They also talk about something called "common morality". Do you see the distinctions they make as hard and fast? As useful or problematic? Why? Do you have an intuition about how to resolve conflicts between them? Pick a topic/create a thesis around these issues. Be sure to define your terms, use examples, and discuss at least one alternative or objection to your views.
2. Pick one of the key ethical approaches we have examined. Evaluate this approach, discussing one key strength and one key weakness of this approach especially in terms of its application in engineering ethics.
3. Compare and contrast utilitarianism and Kantianism in terms of their application in engineering ethics. Be sure to compare and contrast them on at least two key points.
4. Do you see character or virtue ethics fitting in to engineering ethics? If so, what role should they play? How do "good works' fit in, if they do? Moral exemplars (i.e., engineers who serve as role models)? Create a thesis in relation to these questions. Be sure to relate to what we have studied so far, use examples, and treat at least one possible objection or alternative to your view.
5. Pick one of the case study examples in HPR. Show how you would analyze the case using one or more of the ethical approaches we have studied. This will include identifying the relevant facts and ethical issues. It may include line drawing or finding a creative middle way as well as approaches such as act utilitarianism, rule utilitarianism, the never as a means only form of the categorical imperative, etc.
6. Pick one of the case study examples in HPR. Compare and contrast at least two ways in which either the analysis of the case or the conclusion you might reach would differ depending on which ethical approach or methods we have studied you would employ.
7. Evaluate in the light of our study so far the article by Caroline Whitbeck, "Ethics as Design: Doing Justice to Moral Problems," Hastings Center Report 26, no. 3 (1996): 9-16. Be sure to discuss at least one main strength and one main weakness of her views.
*****Wild Card. Write on a topic of your choice based on our readings in this section of the course. However, you must have the instructor approve your topic. You may talk to me after class, visit me in my office, or contact me via email to request approval. One concern is not making the topic/thesis too broad.
Writing Help
Cruz at http://www.williams.edu/philosophy/fourth_layer/faculty_pages/jcruz/moraltutor/ focuses on how to write an ethics paper. He has a page of tips, but he also shows the steps and drafts of a student paper.
Jim Pryor of Princeton has a website with some plain words about writing a philosophy paper. It can be found at http://www.princeton.edu/~jimpryor/general/writing.html
"Philosophy Tools" on my website has many links useful for writing philosophy papers and essays including a Citation FAQ and the Landmark Citation Machine which automatically formats in MLA and APA. It also shows how to set up a grammar checker in MS Word and WordPerfect.
Visit the UI Writing Center - The Writing Center is located in Room 323 on the third floor of the Idaho Commons. Tutors help students with writing projects. For more information, the URL is http://www.class.uidaho.edu/english/WritingCenter/
Harvey, Writing with Sources - textbook for this class