Spring 2013 Ethics Course Study Questions

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All exams are based on these study questions. You are strongly encouraged to keep notes on these study questions as the semester proceeds. This will make you preparation for the mid-term and final much more efficient and productive.

January 07

1st class meeting. No study questions.

January 08

1. How does Cooper define ethics? What are some other approaches?

2. What was the Zimbardo prison experiment and what lessons can be drawn from it?

3. Identify six core ethical principles or intuitions that moral theories typically reference.

January 10

1. Describe Ariely's "matrix test" on cheating and discuss it's implications, in your view.

2. How did Jonathan Haidt challenge the consensus in moral psychology established by Piaget and Kohlberg?

3. What is the point of Haidt's "harmless taboo violations" research?

4. What is ethics for, according to Haidt? Why does he think this (bring later content to bear on this question as well)?

January 14

1. What factors affect one's decision to break with situational control?

2. What Piaget's and Kohlberg's stages of cognitive and moral development? Identify some criticisms of each.

3. How can Kohlberg's stages of moral development help us understand cases like the My Lai massacre?

January 15

1. Reconstruct and evaluate Singer's analysis of relativism and subjectivism.

2. What does it mean to say that ethical reasoning must involve universalizability?

3. How do utilitarians think about "interests"?

January 17

1. How does Aristotle argue that happiness is goal of human existence?

2. How are does our "function" or nature help inform our understanding of the good life and of the kinds of lives (identify them) that can't be the good life?

3. Why is virtue or excellence by itself not sufficient to realize our function?

January 21

1. Describe and evaluate historical (western) thought on the relationship between reason and emotion in Plato, Hume and Jefferson?

2. How does research in evolutionary pschology (Haidt's and others) change the "moralism" of earlier 19th and 20th century "nativism"?

3. Explain the "rider and elephant" metaphor in Haidt's work.

4. What is Haidt's "social intuitionist" model of cognition? How does it work? Evaluate and/or raise questions about it.

January 22

1. What evidence do we have that "intuitions come first"?

2. What are some critical limits and practical consequences of the claim that "intuitions come first"?

January 24

1. Why does virtue require formation through habit?

2. How are we suppose to find virtue as the "golden mean"?

3. Is there really a virtuous amount of anger?

January 28

1. How does Aristotle distinguish the voluntary from the involuntary?

2. What is choice and deliberation for Aristotle?

3. Reconstruct Aristotle's specific analyses of courage and temperance.

January 29

1. How does research on accountability, self-esteem, and confirmation bias support the claim that we engage in strategic reasoning to support our views and biases?

2. Why does Haidt think that good reasoning requires social relationships? Is he right?

January 31

1. How does Hobbes argue for the need for a social contract?

2. How does a modern social contract theorist appeal to reason to justify the social contract?

3. What is the Prisoner's Dilemma and what does it show?