Final Reflection Paper
Some pointers on the final reflection paper
Your final paper, the reflection paper, is a kind of a follow-up paper to the short statement that you handed in at the beginning of the course. To that extent, you can write the paper holding on to the same types of questions that I suggested for that first short statement. To repeat, these questions were the following:
1. What do you think of when you think of ethics or morality?
2. Can you define the concept of ethics?
3. Does being ethical mean being happy?
4. What does being moral consist of according to you? Doing the right thing? Living a fulfilling life?
5. Can one ‘learn’ to be ethical? Or, what are the sources of ethics?
6. Can you give an example of an ethical person / a moral action? And if yes, why do you consider this person/action to be a ‘good’ one?
However, I am not asking you at this point to simply answer these questions. What I am most interested in is a reflection on your part on what you thought of ethics/morality at the beginning of our class and how you think of it now. Do you have new answer to the above questions? Or, have new questions come to mind? Are the doubts you had before answered? Or are there nagging questions left? (Why morality? What can I take from the theories we studied?). The paper thus does not have to be your final reflection on all things moral. It has to be a reflection on where you stand today with regards to where you stood at the start of class.
Concretely, in terms of how the paper will be judged.
a) You need to provide an informed account of your position concerning morality. ‘Informed’ means that you discuss relevant bits and pieces of the main theories and arguments we have discussed throughout our class-meetings and how they got you thinking about morality as well as how they changed your mind or left you with nagging questions.
b) You need to provide well-argued claims. In other words, if you make a claim or posit a question I want you to tell ‘the reader’ why
Your final paper, the reflection paper, is a kind of a follow-up paper to the short statement that you handed in at the beginning of the course. To that extent, you can write the paper holding on to the same types of questions that I suggested for that first short statement. To repeat, these questions were the following:
1. What do you think of when you think of ethics or morality?
2. Can you define the concept of ethics?
3. Does being ethical mean being happy?
4. What does being moral consist of according to you? Doing the right thing? Living a fulfilling life?
5. Can one ‘learn’ to be ethical? Or, what are the sources of ethics?
6. Can you give an example of an ethical person / a moral action? And if yes, why do you consider this person/action to be a ‘good’ one?
However, I am not asking you at this point to simply answer these questions. What I am most interested in is a reflection on your part on what you thought of ethics/morality at the beginning of our class and how you think of it now. Do you have new answer to the above questions? Or, have new questions come to mind? Are the doubts you had before answered? Or are there nagging questions left? (Why morality? What can I take from the theories we studied?). The paper thus does not have to be your final reflection on all things moral. It has to be a reflection on where you stand today with regards to where you stood at the start of class.
Concretely, in terms of how the paper will be judged.
a) You need to provide an informed account of your position concerning morality. ‘Informed’ means that you discuss relevant bits and pieces of the main theories and arguments we have discussed throughout our class-meetings and how they got you thinking about morality as well as how they changed your mind or left you with nagging questions.
b) You need to provide well-argued claims. In other words, if you make a claim or posit a question I want you to tell ‘the reader’ why