1
Ethical Theory MA COMP EXAM - January 2008
Please answer one question from each section. Avoid overlapping answers.
Section I.
1. Kant claims that the normativity of ethical principles for rational beings springs from
the autonomy that rationality itself implies. Explain Kant's argument for this view and
critically evaluate it.
2. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle claims that a person cannot rely in moral
decision-making on any straightforward set of principles or moral rules but at most
exercise his or her moral judgment. How, if at all, does Aristotle avoid the charge of
moral relativism?
3. Contractualist moral theories claim that I should treat other people only in ways that
they (if they are reasonable) would agree are justified. On what notion of
"reasonableness" does contractualism rest? Does contractualism do justice to our moral
intuitions about how others ought to be treated?
Section II.
4. Neither utilitarianism nor deontology, at least in their pure forms, makes room for
what Samuel Scheffler has called "agent-centered prerogatives." Neither theory, in
other words, allows people's desires to further their own projects to trump what morality
demands. Discuss the success or failure of either utilitarianism or deontology in
dismissing the morality of agent-centered prerogatives.
5. What is Nozick’s Wilt Chamberlain example supposed to prove as regards our
alleged rights to freedom and equality? What, if anything, does it prove?
6. Some feminist moral philosophers claim that the notion of "care" has been
neglected in the history of moral philosophy and that an ethics of care is in tension with
moral theories that emphasize responsibility and justice. Rehearse and critically
evaluate two moral theories, one that endorses an ethics of care and one that is
explicitly opposed to it.
Section III
7. Explain and evaluate the way the expressivist theory of either Gibbard, Blackburn,
or Timmons/Horgan deals with the Frege-Geach problem.
8. What is Michael Smith’s allegedly inconsistent triad of propositions regarding the
language of morality? Are they really inconsistent? If so, which should we drop?
9. Which version of the prisoner’s dilemma seems to raise the most serious difficulty for
the idea that acting morally is a matter of acting rationally? Is there really a problem? If
there is, what should we conclude?