Essay Two Prompts
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 four 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 objections.
Essays will be graded for both form and content as indicated in Points to Consider in Evaluating Essays. You should use these points as one guide in proof-reading drafts of your essay.
Choose ONE of the following questions/prompts or the Wild Card:
1.
Make a case that engineers should or should not take into account intrinsic value
in dealing with environmental issues. In your essay define intrinsic value, use
examples to illustrate, and pose and respond to at least one objection to your position.
2.
Discuss how the approaches to risk of engineers including risk experts, the general
public, and government regulators differ according to HPR, Chapter 7. What problems and
opportunities do the differing approaches pose in your view? In your essay define
any important terms and use at least two examples to illustrate.
3. HPR attempt at the end of Chapter 7 to "formulate a principle of acceptable risk" (175) which they set forth on p. 176. Evaluate this principle. You should take into account all the relevant issues introduced earlier in the chapter and any others you think are relevant.
4. The Online Ethics Center has a case article that
has both environmental and safety considerations. The
case is “Ethical
Issues in the Design of Ultra-Lightweight Vehicles” by Missy Cummings and Anke Von Gorp and can be found at http://www.onlineethics.dnsalias.com/CMS/enviro/enviroessays/ULV.aspx
(accessed March 21, 2008)
Read all the materials
including the links and comments by students at University of Virginia and Delft
University of Technology. (Note: the online questionnaire is now disabled.) Describe one or two key ethical issues you see this
case raising. Given our readings this
semester, how would you suggest that an ethical engineer should deal with the issue(s) in
this case. Resources you likely will
want to refer to are an ethical theory or theories such as act or rule utilitarianism or
Kantianism (including respect for persons), considerations raised in HPR especially
chapters 7 and 9, and possibly line drawing or finding a creative middle way,
5. Do you think HPR do justice to non-anthropocentric
approaches to environmental ethics in Chapter 9? Why or why not? In
particular, do they do justice to how one or more aspects of Leopold’s land ethic
might be of use to engineers? Use examples to
illustrate and respond to at least one objection to your position.
6.
What are the main arguments for and against extending engineer’s obligations
to the environment beyond the health related that HPR describe? How do you evaluate
HPR’s “two modest proposals” (237-40)?
Do they address the right questions? What do you see as their strengths and
weaknesses?
*****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