Assignment Task 1: Illustrating Moral Claims
Exercise Instructions: Offer one fanciful and one realistic example that illustrates each of the following moral claims.
A. Sometimes people become convinced they should prefer a social arrangement, even if that arrangement is oppressive for them.
B. Policies that unfairly exclude a social group from work and social life are oppressive.
Assignment Task 2: Counterexamples to Moral Generalizations
Exercise Instructions: Offer a counterexample for each of the following moral claims. For additional practice and fun, try offering one fanciful and one realistic counterexample in each case.
A. It's always wrong to destroy natural resources.
B. Any policy that excludes a whole group from work or social life is oppressive.
Assignment Task 3: Representing Simpler Arguments in Standard Form
Exercise Instructions: The following passages contain simple arguments, some of which are moral arguments and some of which are non-moral arguments. Represent each argument in standard form.
A. Is death bad for the one who dies? No. After all, something is bad for you only if you exist when it happens. But you do not exist when you are dead.?
B. A being has moral rights only if it makes sense to hold it accountable for its choices and praise or blame it, in moral terms, for those choices. Thus, non-human animals do not have moral rights, since it makes no sense to hold them morally accountable for the things they do.
Assignment Task 4: Representing Arguments with Implicit Content Exercise Instructions: The following passages contain arguments with implicit premises and/or conclusions. Represent each argument in standard form, and be sure to make explicit any content the author of the passage has left implicit.
God has commanded us not to steal, and therefore stealing is morally wrong.
God's commanding something is not what makes it right or wrong. If it were, then it would be right to torture a baby for fun if God had commanded us to do that.
People act like it's obvious that there are objective moral facts: that there are at least some things that are right or wrong independently of what anyone happens to think or feel about the matter.
Some people believe that the rightness or wrongness of a person's actions depends on that person's culture. On this view, whether arranged child marriages (for instance) are actually right or wrong for a person just depends on whether their culture endorses or frowns upon the practice. But the idea that what's right or wrong depends on cultural attitudes is highly implausible. If what's actually right for you depends on what your culture says, then committing rape would be right for you if your culture endorsed rape as a wholesome practice.