Defend an interpretation of Pruss’s argument, and then raise one objection to one claim or inference in that argument, making clear why the objection counts as an objection to Pruss’s argument.

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Alexander Pruss’s argument

Assess one aspect of Alexander Pruss’s argument that abortion is generally impermissible, as follows: Defend an interpretation of Pruss’s argument, and then raise one objection to one claim or inference in that argument, making clear why the objection counts as an objection to Pruss’s argument. You may also respond to this objection on Pruss’s behalf, but you are not required to.

Explain the main argument of the reading that is accurate and fairly represents the author’s reasoning. 3. Critical Evaluate of the argument that includes an objection to one of its premises.

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Choose one of the readings in the ‘Moral Problems’ section of The Ethical Life textbook and critical evaluate its main argument

Reading – “why abortion is immoral” by Don Marquis
Your essay should have four parts:

1. Introduction that states what reading you will engage with and a clear thesis statement on its argument.

2. Explanation of the main argument of the reading that is accurate and fairly represents the author’s reasoning.

3. Critical Evaluation of the argument that includes an objection to one of its premises.

4. Conclusion that summarizes the essay and thesis statement.

Your essay should be 600-700 words written in MLA format.

Submit a 4 page paper describing your personal source(s) of wisdom and how you bring that wisdom to your business.

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Personal source of wisdom

Submit a 4 page paper describing your personal source(s) of wisdom and how you bring that wisdom to your business.

Why does coca production concern the U.S. government? What are the key forces of economics behind the growing of coca?   What conflicting goals exist within U.S. society which influence the problem?

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Bolivia’s Coca

Questions to Consider:
What is Bolivia’s official policy for growing coca? Why are there rules
governing the growth of this agricultural product?
2.)  Why does coca production concern the U.S. government?
3.)  What are the key forces of economics behind the growing of coca?
4.)  What conflicting goals exist within U.S. society which influence the problem?
5.)  What incentives and disincentives exist for coca growers?

Discuss how moral agency and organizational ethical principles serve as the foundation for ethical decision making.

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NA

Discuss how moral agency and organizational ethical principles serve as the foundation for ethical decision making.

Is it ethical for companies to require employees to take a polygraph test before they are hired or promoted? Would your answer be different if the company made products from a secret formula that competitors have so far been unsuccessful in imitating?

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Week 7 ethics discussion post

You cannot just login, post several times in one day, and be done. Think of this as a discussion that we may have in the classroom, except that we are doing it online over a week. You are expected to respond to the discussion prompt with your initial post by 11:59 PM on Day 4. After submitting your initial post, provide 2 response posts, on 2 separate days. For example, if you submit your initial post on Day 4, you will submit a response post on 2 different days after Day 4. All posts need to be submitted no later than Day 7.

All posts should be thoughtful, respectful, and add substantive value to the discussion. One or two sentences is not a substantive response. All posts should be written using full sentences in paragraph form. The use of philosophical concepts, wherever relevant, is highly recommended to earn full points. Please provide both in-text citations and post-text references. Do not bother claiming that you did not provide in-text citations and post-text references because everything came from your head. You are required to include textual evidence for your claims.

Discussion Prompt

Select one of the three prompts below to respond to in your initial post this week. You are encouraged to respond to peers that explored the prompts that you did not.

Prompt #1

Is it ethical for companies to require employees to take a polygraph test before they are hired or promoted? Would your answer be different if the company made products from a secret formula that competitors have so far been unsuccessful in imitating? What benefit do companies accrue if ethics is made a part of their corporate culture?

 

Prompt #2

Sometimes liquor and tobacco companies create ads that link the consumption of its goods with popularity, love, friendship, and financial success.

Do you think this is ethical?
Would your answer change if the company engaged in some Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) by occasionally publishing an ad that stressed the importance of consuming their product responsibly?
Be sure to include the perspectives of social contract theory and virtue ethics in your responses.
(USLOs 7.1, 7.2, 7.3)

Prompt #3

Opioid addiction continues to be a cause for national and global concern. Each year, hundreds of thousands wind up in the black market to be sold illegally. Some government organizations, such as a congressional crime committee, believe that pharmaceutical companies cannot be blamed if their products are used illegally.

Do pharmaceutical companies have any moral responsibility to ensure their products are not consumed illegitimately?
How would you recognize an ethical pharmaceutical company – what are its characteristics?
Which organization should be held morally culpable for solving this issue?
Be sure to include the perspectives of social contract theory and virtue ethics in your responses.

Analyze a film’s ethical dimensions that include its characters and the story.

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Ethical Analysis Essay Outline

Instructions: The purpose of this assignment is to write an outline as the first step of the Ethical Analysis Essay that is due near the end of the term. The Ethical Analysis Essay requires that you analyze a film’s ethical dimensions that include its characters and the story.

First, select a film from the list of available works. If you cannot access these films, you may select a different film, but you will require prior approval from your instructor.

Films for Ethical Analysis Essay

John Q (2002) – Story centers on a man whose nine-year-old son desperately needs a life-saving transplant. When he discovers that his medical insurance will not cover surgery costs and alternative government aid is unavailable, John Q. Archibald takes a hospital emergency room hostage in a final attempt to save his child.

The Jacket (2005) – A Gulf war veteran is wrongly sent to a mental institution for insane criminals, where he becomes the object of a doctor’s experiments, and his life is completely affected by them. The film centers on a wounded Gulf war veteran who returns to his native Vermont suffering from bouts of amnesia.

The Last King of Scotland (2006) – While in Uganda on a medical mission, Scottish doctor Nicholas Garrigan becomes the personal physician and close confidante of dictator Idi Amin. Although at first Dr. Garrigan feels flattered by his new position of power, he soon realizes that Amin’s rule is soaked in blood, and complicit in the atrocities. Garrigan faces the fight of his life as he tries to escape Amin’s grasp.

My Sister’s Keeper (2009) – Told from multiple perspectives, My Sister’s Keeper follows the story of 13-year-old Anna Fitzgerald as she sues her parents, Brian, and Sara, for medical emancipation. Anna was conceived as an allogeneic donor for her sister, Kate, who has acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL).

Extraordinary Measures (2010) – John Crowley is a man on the corporate fast-track, with a beautiful wife and three children. Just as his career is taking off, he learns that his two youngest kids have a fatal disease. John leaves his job and devotes himself to saving their lives. He joins forces with Dr. Robert Stonehill, a brilliant but eccentric scientist. Together they battle the medical and corporate establishment, racing against time for a cure.

Contagion (2011) – When Beth Emhoff returns to Minnesota from a Hong Kong business trip, she attributes the malaise she feels to jet lag. However, two days later, Beth is dead, and doctors tell her shocked husband that they have no idea what killed her. Soon, many others start to exhibit the same symptoms, and a global pandemic explodes. Doctors try to contain the lethal microbe, but society begins to collapse as a blogger (Jude Law) fans the flames of paranoia.

Awakenings (1990) – The story of a doctor’s extraordinary work in the Sixties with a group of catatonic patients he finds languishing in a Bronx hospital. Speculating that their rigidity may be akin to an extreme form of Parkinsonism, he seeks permission from his skeptical superiors to treat them with L-dopa, a drug that was used to treat Parkinson’s disease at the time.

Coma (1978) – A young doctor in a hospital discovers that many patients are being induced into comas from simple routine surgeries. She soon finds a deep conspiracy developing that leads her to believe that nothing is as it seems. The comas are deliberate acts to permanently incapacitate patients who are later transferred to a facility called The Jefferson Institute where illegal activities are being conducted with comatose subjects.

Extreme Measures (1996) – A young British doctor confronts a famous colleague about the true methods of his work. The doctor wishes to determine why the body of a man who died in his emergency room disappears.

Gattaca (1997) – Vincent Freeman has always fantasized about traveling into outer space but is grounded by his status as a genetically inferior “in-valid.” He decides to fight his fate by purchasing Jerome Morrow’s genes, a laboratory-engineered “valid.” He assumes Jerome’s DNA identity and joins the Gattaca space program, where he falls in love with Irene. An investigation into the death of a Gattaca officer complicates Vincent’s plans.

Next, view the film and then write an outline. This outline should be written using the following subheadings (Introduction and Ethical Analysis). Write 2-5 sentences for each criterion (Introduction and Ethical Analysis). The outline be a minimum of 250 words in length.

Does the program specifically and effectively address the dangers of unethical leadership, of possible misbehavior among the corporation’s most senior executives? Does the program take into account the dangers of organizational behavior, as well as individual misdeeds?

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Vulnerabilities


For successes, there are significant limitations to Lockheed
Martin’s approach to ethics. Measured against its own standards and those of the contemporary ethics industry, Lockheed Martin’s program shines. Measured against the expectations of the broader culture, however, the program falls short. There is a significant gap between how corporate America judges itself and how its ideas about values and integrity play out in the larger culture. Lockheed Martin’s ethics program, for all its excellent qualities, illustrates that gap. One consequence of this gap is that the corporation’s quest to be seen as an active force for good in American life remains, at best, incomplete. Another consequence is that the company’s program is better at responding to the problems of the past than to the problems of the future. Lockheed Martin’s ethics program addresses people, but it does not address systems. The exclusive emphasis on lived individual experience is appealing and in many ways effective. But the impact of a corporation like Lockheed Martin is not simply the accretion of millions of acts of fundamental decency undertaken by workers. It is also the impact of the corporation as a very powerful organization, or, rather, as a collection of very powerful organizations. Lockheed Martin’s program is innovative in reaching the employees, but that is not enough. Innovation for innovation, evil will eventually outflank virtue. It thrives not in the isolated human heart, but in the very spirit of collective enterprise that corporations value.
The gaps in the program are most apparent when it is examined in the light of the long-standing expectations in American life regarding corporate behavior. When it comes to addressing the moral character of the corporation’s leaders, the conduct of the corporation toward its customers and competitors, the company’s treatment of its employees, its impact on its various communities, and the ethical considerations regarding profit within its industry, Lockheed Martin’s programs leave major questions untouched. By drawing strict boundaries around their ethics enterprises, American corporations risk losing the public credibility that they are working so hard to maintain.
One way to look at this is to ask of Lockheed Martin’s program a series of simple questions that grow out of the historical conceptions of business ethics that I discussed in chapter:
• Does the program specifically and effectively address the dangers of unethical leadership, of possible misbehavior among the corporation’s most senior executives?
• Does the program take into account the dangers of organizational behavior, as well as individual misdeeds?
• Does the program convincingly address the needs and concerns of rank-and-file employees of the corporation?
• Does the program convincingly tackle the full range of issues involved in assessing the corporation’s ultimate impact on its local, regional, national, and global communities?

The answers to these questions suggest that Lockheed Martin’s program fails to go as far as it could, creating potential areas of vulnerability for the future.

Provide an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of Peter Singer’s arguments in Chapter 1 of Animal Liberation (where he presents his theory of equal consideration).

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Animal Liberation

Provide an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of Peter Singer’s arguments in Chapter 1 of Animal Liberation (where he presents his theory of equal consideration). Support your position and anticipate counter-arguments. Try to spend an equal amount of time on the strengths and weaknesses. You may rely on and cite other in-class sources, such as Pollan or Gruen.

Do any of these statistics surprise you?  Which two, if any?  Why?  If you are not surprised, then indicate why.  Since this was taken from a 2009 poll, we might wonder if a 2019 study would be any different.  What do you think?  Why?

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Sexual Morality

PART 1
As our Chapter 15 introduction indicates, “Sex has probably always been controversial, a volatile subject that triggers intense emotions, social angst, and legal and religious sanctions” (380).  First of all, go to the Vital Stats on page 537, and read the “Sexual Behavior” statistics reports.  Do any of these statistics surprise you?  Which two, if any?  Why?  If you are not surprised, then indicate why.  Since this was taken from a 2009 poll, we might wonder if a 2019 study would be any different.  What do you think?  Why?
PART 2
Now read the background on “Sexual Morality” on pages 536 through the first top column of page 541.   Pay close attention to the perspectives pertaining to pornography as well as campus sexual assault.   Which of the views do you think carry perhaps the strongest argument, with all points considered?  Why?  (Note: Think from a philosophical point-of-view.)

PART 3

Now, watch this film clip which purports to explain more about the addiction to pornography: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ya67aLaaCc
How does this film clip’s perspective complement and/or contradict what the textbook presents?  Be specific in your response.

PART 4
Then, read the “Moral Theories” section closely on pages 541-542, moving into the “Moral Arguments” section which completes this chapter.  How strong is the utilitarian argument compared/contrasted to the Kantian view?  Analyze What are five (5) of the most interesting insights you gained from this section? Elaborate on each of them.   

PART 5
Now select ONE of the readings at the end of the chapter, giving preference to one which may advance a position with which you take issue.  Now, write a brief paragraph of around 6-7 sentences in which you critique that view.  Be sure to identify the reading you selected.