Reflect critically on any current events that might be relevant to our subject matter.
Journals: will be collected throughout the semester. In these, I will expect you to reflect critically on any current events that might be relevant to our subject matter, as well as your own views on topics in contemporary ethics.
Each entry should be between 200 and 1000 words.
In the journals you should explain your ethical opinion about any current topic, whether it is from your personal life or a topic being discussed by the media. For example, you could write about a disagreement you are having with someone in your home life, or you could write about Donald Trump’s campaign style. In the journals I am mainly concerned with how thoughtfully you develop your own opinions. The topics you write about do not have to match the topics we are reading about in the text book, although as we progress through the class I would like you to use your new knowledge from the text book to help develop your opinions. For the first journal you submit I don’t expect you to refer to the text book (although you can if you want), and even in subsequent journals, again, the main focus is on your own opinions. The hope is that you will be able to see how your ethical opinions have evolved by the time you reach the later journal entries. As long as I can tell you took some time to carefully develop an ethical opinion about a current topic, you will get full credit.
Just a few topics we have discussed over the past week:
- Claims and Arguments (pp. 43-45):
- Arguments Good and Bad (pp. 45-49):
- Implied Premises (pp. 49-50):
- Deconstructing Arguments (pp. 50-53):
- Moral Statements and Arguments (pp. 53-55):
- Testing Moral Premises (pp. 55-57):
- Assessing Nonmoral Premises (pp. 57-58):
- Avoiding Bad Arguments (pp. 58-62):
Vaughn, L. (2015). Doing Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (4th Ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.