Ethical Questions
Please read these assignment instructions before writing your paper, and re-read them often during and after the writing process to make sure that you are fulfilling all of the instructions. Please also utilize the assignment guidance, the modeled example
, and the outline provided.
Overview
The following assignment is an exercise designed to help you begin the process of addressing a moral issue, a process that will continue in the next two assignments. In this exercise, you will do the following:
- Formulate an ethical question within one of the given topic areas from the list provided.
- Provide an introduction in which you briefly explain the topic and the particular question on which you will focus your paper.
- State your position on the question at issue.
- Identify one consideration that would support your position and one consideration that would challenge it.
Instructions
The exercise must be at least 500 words in length (excluding title and reference pages) and formatted according to APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.. Be sure to include a title page and, if you include references, a bibliography. The exercise should be in outline (not essay) format, with each part labeled and numbered as specified below.
- Part One: Formulate the Question
Read through the list of available topic areas, and select a topic on which you would like to write your next two papers. Formulate a specific, concrete, ethical question pertaining to that topic, and place that at the top of your paper.
The question should be specific enough to discuss in six to eight pages (which is the length of the Final Paper assignment). For example, if you were interested in discussing the topic of capital punishment, a question like “Is capital punishment wrong?” would be too vague, and would need to be reformulated as a more specific question, such as “Should we execute people convicted of first degree murder?” or “Is it just to use capital punishment when there is the possibility of executing innocent persons?” or “Is the capital punishment system racist?”
- Part Two: Provide a Brief Introduction to the Topic
Your introduction should focus on setting out the topic and scope of the discussion in a way that clearly establishes what exactly you will be talking about and why it is significant. It should also provide any necessary context such as the background, current state of affairs, definitions of key terms, and so on. You want to try to do this in a way that stays as neutral as possible, avoids controversial assumptions, rhetorical questions, and the like. In other words, you should try to construct an introduction to the topic that could be an introduction to a paper defending any position on the question at issue.
It is important for your introduction to narrow down the topic as much as possible. Doing so will allow you to provide a more detailed consideration of the issues and explain the reasoning more clearly in later papers. In general, arguments and analyses are much stronger when they focus on addressing a particular issue thoroughly and in detail, and doing so often requires deciding on one particular question or point to discuss, and leaving other possible ones aside.
You should label this section of your paper as “Introduction.”
- Part Three: Provide a Position Statement
State clearly and precisely the position you intend to defend on the question you have formulated. This does not need to be more than one sentence.
Note that providing a position statement does not necessarily presume that you are confident in your position, that other positions do not have merit, or that you cannot change your mind later. However, for now, it is important to at least tentatively take a stand on a position you believe to be better supported than others.
Label this section as “Position Statement.”
- Part Four: Identify and Explain a Supporting Reason
Identify and explain a plausible reason someone could give that supports the position you have taken and be sure to clearly explain why you think it supports that position. The explanation should aim to be three to five sentences (shorter explanations are possible, but will likely be inadequate; longer explanations are likely to be too verbose).
Label this section as “Supporting Reason.”
- Part Five: Identify and Explain an Opposing Reason
Identify and explain a plausible reason someone might give that would oppose or challenge the position you have taken and be sure to clearly explain why you think it would oppose or challenge it. The explanation should aim to be three to five sentences (shorter explanations are possible, but will likely be inadequate; longer explanations are likely to be too verbose). You should strive to articulate that reason in a way that someone defending a contrary position to your own would do. This requires stepping back from your own position and being able to think about the problem as objectively as you can. You should not attempt to respond to this opposing reason.
An example of the assignment is below. Of course assuming you know how to do the proper margins, running head, etc in Microsoft word.
Running head: ABORTION RIGHTS
Abortion Rights
Firstname
Last
name
PHI 208 Ethics and Moral Reasoning
Prof.
Phil Osipher
December 31,
1999
Running head: ABORTION RIGHTS
Abortion Rights
First name
Last name
PHI 208
Ethics and Moral Reasoning
Prof. Phil Osipher December 31, 1999
ABORTION RIGHTS
Example 1(see below for another example that takes up a different question and different point of view):
Abortion Rights Should abortions be allowed in certain specific cases, such as when the mother’s life is at risk, but not in other cases?Introduction: Since Roe vs. Wade struck down state laws banning abortion in 1971, the topic of abortion has been perhaps the most consistently divisive issue in the United States.According to the Center for Disease Control(2012), an “abortion”is “an intervention performed by a licensed clinician (e.g., a physician, nurse-midwife, nurse practitioner, or physician assistant) that is intended to terminate an ongoing pregnancy”(para. 2).Moreover, this is an issue that affects on average well over a million women a year, according to the Center for Disease Control’s (2014) statistics on women who either have an abortion or an unwanted pregnancy. Abortions may be performed to save a mother’s life, because the mother did not intend to become pregnant and does not want the child, because having the child would bring severe hardship, and for countless other reasons as well. This makes the issue quite complicated and complex, which partly accounts for its divisiveness as well as the need to consider the ethical dimensions carefully and thoughtfully.In this essay, I will focus on cases in which continuing with a pregnancy would put a pregnant woman’s life in danger, and whether abortions in those cases should be regarded as morally different than ones in which her life is not at abnormal risk.Position Statement:
ABORTION RIGHTS 3 A human fetus has equal dignity to other humans, and thus it should only be permissible to intentionally kill it when the mother’s life i sat risk.Supporting Reason: Human societies throughout history have often failed to recognize the full dignity of other human beings as equal “persons”or to care for the weakest and most vulnerable, and thus we should avoid making that same mistake with fetuses by applying the same laws against intentional killing to them that we would to any other human being. However, when protecting the life of the fetus means the mother’s life will be in severe danger, and they cannot both be saved,it wouldn’t necessarily violate the dignity of the fetus to abort it. Opposing Reason: Even though abortion involves taking the life of a biologically human creature, it lacks the kind of self-understanding or self-awareness that we sometimes associate with person hood, and it’s total dependency on another person’s body for life means it lacks the independence we also associate with person hood.
ABORTION RIGHTS4ReferencesCenter for Disease Control. (2012). CDCs Abortion Surveillance System FAQs. Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/data_stats/A… for Disease Control. (2014). Data and Statistics. Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/Data_Stats/index.htm#AbortionReagan, L. (1997). When abortion was a crime: women, medicine, and law in the United States, 1867-1973. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. World Health Organization. (2007). Unsafe abortion: global and regional estimates of the incidence of unsafe abortion and associated mortality in 2003. –5thed. Geneva, Switzerland: WHO Publications.
ABORTION RIGHTS5Example 2:Abortion RightsIs restricting abortion rights an unjust restriction on a woman’s right to make her own reproductive choices? Introduction: Since Roe vs. Wade struck down state laws banning abortion in 1971, the topic of abortion has been perhaps the most consistently divisive issue in the United States.According to the Center for Disease Control(2012), an “abortion” is “an intervention performed by a licensed clinician (e.g., a physician, nurse-midwife, nurse practitioner, or physician assistant) that is intended to terminate an ongoing pregnancy”(para. 2). Moreover, this is an issue that affects on average well over a million women a year, according to the Center for Disease Control’s (2014) statistics on women who either have an abortion or an unwanted pregnancy. Abortions may be performed to save a mother’s life, because the mother did not intend to become pregnant and does not want the child, because having the child would bring severe hardship, and for countless other reasons as well. This makes the issue quite complicated and complex, which partly accounts for its divisiveness as well as the need to consider the ethical dimensions carefully and thoughtfully. In this essay, I will consider the rights women have to self-determination, especially concerning reproduction, and how those rights pertain to the legal procurement of abortion.Position Statement:
ABORTION RIGHTS6A pregnant woman has the right to determine for herself whether or not continuing a pregnancy would present severe enough burdens to make having an abortion a moral decision. Supporting Reason: Most people, even those who think abortion is wrong or that a fetus has a right to life, recognize that there might be circumstances in which aborting a fetus can be justified. However, every woman’s circumstances are different, and thus only the pregnant woman herself can judge how carrying a child to term would affect her life. Moreover, we almost always recognize that a woman should have the right to determine for herself whether to get pregnant in the first place, which might suggest that the same consideration would seem to apply to the choice as to whether to continue a pregnancy. Opposing Reason: Rights of self-determination normally must not be exercised in a way that violates the basic rights of other people, even when a certain decision might relive burdens. For example, we don’t allow women to determine whether a child that has been born should continue living, which might raise worries about why she should be able to make that determination simply because the fetus has not yet been born.
