CHAPTER 8- Summary & Quiz - Answering Moral Questions– Ethics & Contemporary Moral Issues Reading
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5 True/False & 10 Multiple
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Chapter 8. Answering Moral Questions
This chapter introduces a general method for answering specific moral questions. The method has six steps:
1. Gather information about your chosen issue.
2. Identify a specific moral question to answer.
3. Identify salient answers to your chosen question.
4. Identify important arguments for and against each answer.
5. Identify and evaluate important objections to each argument.
6. Draw a final conclusion.
For gathering information, basic journalistic questions—Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? —provide helpful prompts. It is important to seek well-informed, nonpartisan sources and to avoid confirmation bias.
Once you know a good amount about your issue or topic, you’ll want to formulate a specific moral question. You can always refine your question later.
The next step is to identify salient answers to your question, meaning answers that are commonly accepted, especially plausible, or endorsed by smart people who have thought a lot about the issue.
Then you’ll be ready to begin identifying arguments for and against the various answers you’ve compiled. Use the skills and concepts developed in Chapters 3–7 to help you come up with arguments and understand the arguments that you find elsewhere.
Once you have a list of arguments, start looking for objections to those arguments, remembering that objections are themselves arguments, not simple statements of disagreement.
Finally, consider all of the arguments for all of the various answers you’ve identified, taking into account the objections to each argument. Then pick the answer to your question that you think is best supported by the arguments, regardless of whether it’s the one you initially thought was correct.
True/False Section [5 Questions]
1. The first step in the six-step process from Chapter 8 is deciding what moral claim you want to find arguments for.
2. According to Chapter 8, one of the major challenges in gathering information about your topic is avoiding confirmation bias.
3. According to Chapter 8, you should identify exactly two arguments for and two arguments against each of the salient answers to your chosen question.
4. A rebutting objection is an argument that shows that the conclusion of another argument is False.
5. The ad hominem fallacy involves criticizing a distorted version of someone's argument rather than the original version.
Multiple Choice Section [10 Questions]
1. Which of the following is NOT listed as one of the steps in the six-step process for answering moral questions that was outlined in Chapter 8?
2. Which of the following does Chapter 8 recommend if you are having trouble finding reliable information about your topic?
3. Which of the following best illustrates the idea of confirmation bias?
4. Which of the following best illustrates the idea of confirmation bias?
5. Which of the following arguments commits the fallacy of equivocation?
6. Which of the following best explains the idea of a strawman fallacy?
7. Consider the following argument. Farouk argues that climate change is no big deal because the climate has always changed. He is misleading people because although the climate has always changed, the climate is currently changing much more quickly than in the past. And anyway, past climate changes have been very disruptive, so the fact that they've always happened is not a good reason to think that climate change is no big deal. Which of the following fallacies does this argument commit?
8. Because it aims to show that the conclusion of Walter Sinnott-Armstrong's argument is false, Avram Hiller's argument counts as what kind of objection?
9. Cevin Soling's argument is an argument for which salient answer to the question about the ethics of cheating in college?
10. Brooke Sadler's argument is: [Show Less]