Philosophy 361 Ethics Darwall Fall 2000

The exam will be three questions (my choice) drawn from the following questions. Question 1 has a special status, since you are guaranteed that you may answer that question, no matter what the makeup of the exam is otherwise, but that you will not be required to answer it. For example, suppose I pick three (other) questions, and ask you to answer each of them. Then you may substitute question 1 for any of those questions. Or suppose that I pick four and ask you to answer three. Then you may answer only two of those and question 1. And so on.

1. In Philosophical Ethics and in my lectures for the course, I have presented interpretations of Mill, Aristotle, Kant, and Nietzsche. Write an essay in which you submit my interpretation of one of these philosophers to critical scrutiny. Give reasons for questioning my presentation of the philosopher’s ideas and arguments. (Of course, you don’t have to disagree with everything I say. Say where you agree, where you disagree, and why—both with my interpretation of the philosopher’s view, and with the view, as you interpret it.

2. Discuss Kant's position on the moral worth of actions in light of Gilligan's "ethics of responsibility", and vice versa. Critically assess the objections each would make to the views of the other, and their respective replies, illustrating what general issues between their respective views are at stake.

3. "Happiness is desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end." (Mill, Utilitarianism, IV.2) "Verbally there is very general agreement; for both the general run of men and the people of superior refinement say that it ["the highest of all goods achievable by action"] is happiness, and identify living well and faring well with being happy." (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I.4) Taking off from these passages, compare and contrast Mill and Aristotle on the good. Give special consideration to: the relation between virtue and the good, the relation between pleasure and happiness, and how Mill and Aristotle can hold there to be a single most final good while, apparently, holding that there are a variety of intrinsic goods. Also, discuss this issue at the level of both normative ethics and metaethics. Finally, say some thing about the respective methods that Mill and Aristotle follow in arriving at their ideas.

4. Critically discuss the problem Harman raises concerning the relation between ethics and observation in relation to the views of two of Aristotle, Mill, and Kant.

5. Critically discuss the issue of ethical relativism, both in its own terms and in relation to the ideas of one of Aristotle, Kant, or Nietzsche.

6. Critically compare and contrast Aristotle on a good human life's involving rational activity with what Kant says about the relation of morality to practical reason. What do we learn from this about the fundamental differences between their views of ethics and morality, respectively?

7. Compare and contrast the Kantian demand that we act in accord with principles we could legislate in a Kingdom of Ends with rule-utilitarianism. Among other things, discuss this question in relation to Rawls’s ideas in A Theory of Justice compared with Rawls’s essay, "Two Concepts of Rules."

8. We have explicitly considered the sort of critique that might be mounted against both Kantian and utilitarian theories from the perspective of the ethics of care. But what about Aristotle's philosophy? Critically compare and contrast the critical perspective the "different voice" gives on Aristotle's theory with that it provides on utilitarianism and Kantianism. How do these criticisms illuminate what is most central to each of the views being criticized, as well as to ethics of care?

9. Critically discuss Nietzsche’s critique of morality and the best defense that either Kant or Mill might make of morality in light of Nietzsche’s critique. Consider what responses Nietzsche might best make and say who you think would have the best of this debate and why. (Do not answer this question if you wrote your second paper on topic #3.)