Exam 13: Aristotle's Ethics: Exploring Virtue and Justice

According to Mill, the way to tell which of two pleasures is of higher quality is to see which pleasure is preferred by competent judges, where competent judges are people with enough experience with both pleasures.

Which of the following would count as an objection to Nell's argument that famine deaths violate people's right not to be killed unjustifiably although they are the unintended, uncertain, and not immediate consequences of the actions of many?

What does Thomson want us to conclude about abortion on the basis of her thought experiment involving the violinist?

Which of the following best captures Dougherty's explanation of what is required for the harm explanation to be a genuine alternative to the consent explanation?

Which of the following claims can we infer from Shue's discussion of ticking bomb cases?

What role does the claim that one should save a child drowning in a pond that one is walking past play in Singer's paper?

Which of the following is not a premise in Singer's argument that we should extend the principle of equality to nonhuman animals?

Wolf's main goal in "Physician-Assisted Suicide" is:

Which of the following best captures Garcia's analysis of why "word-of-mouth" job recruitment and the "old boy network" are not necessarily cases of institutional racism?

Why does Liu discuss the argument that accepting moral constraints arising from equal moral recognition respect entails accepting certain moral constraints on appraisal and appreciation respects?

Singer gives two reasons why we should not base the moral principle of human equality on any factual equality between human beings. State those reasons in your own words and provide examples.

According to Eaton, what levels of cause and effective operate in the harm hypothesis, what variables operate at each level, and what kinds of harms could potentially be caused by pornography?

Connect Thomas's argument for diversity with Garcia's account of racism. Is Thomas implicitly relying on the same conception of racism that Garcia defends? Are their conclusions mutually contradictory?

What other arguments might someone offer to distinguish between killing and allowing someone to die?

Garcia thinks that preferential treatment in affirmative action is racist because it is a form of discrimination based on race.

Bentham believes he can provide a conclusive proof of the principle of utility.

According to Garcia, racially offensive speech is not the same as racist hate speech, because the former does not necessarily involve any racial antipathy.

Bentham claims that individual actions should be based on pleasure and pain, whereas laws and legislation should be based on rights.

Suppose someone objected to Abbate's argument as follows. Abbate notes that commanders give explicit orders about how to respond to the presence of civilians during a combat operation. She argues that these orders specify which risks to assume to protect those civilians and that therefore soldiers ought not to assume any additional risks beyond those required by their commanders. But sometimes a situation will arise for which the commanders' orders do not specify what to do. In those cases, soldiers are permitted and perhaps obligated to assume extra risks to protect those civilians. Therefore, soldiers are sometimes permitted or even obligated to assume extra risks to avoid collateral casualties. Based on Abbate's arguments, how do you think she would respond to that objection?

Nell claims that people in affluent countries have no duty to prevent the deaths of impoverished people in faraway countries.