The text has covered many of the foundational ethical concepts, distinctions, and theories.  Now  some fairly complex essays dealing with pretty complicated ethical issues will be presented.  The reader is better prepared to recognize the ethical principles that will appear in those texts.

You are asked to consider certain questions in light of those readings and to formulate your own position on the issue or the case.

The reader should have enough sophistication to respond to ethical dilemmas with a more considered and reflective and informed set of sentences and perhaps a well formulated position resting upon explicitly stated set of ethical principles.   There should be no use of such trite phrases as: "well, if it's true for him, who am I to say what's right", or "ethics is subjective -- there cannot be an answer", etc.

Such responses are woefully inadequate not only for someone who has studied ethics but also for a society that needs a resolution to moral dilemmas and conflicts.  There are theoretical objections to such responses, which were covered in the early chapters, and then there is the psychological objection -- that such responses are not much more than a "cop-out" -- an excuse for not doing the hard analytic work they (and ethics in general) demand.

So now you are to read the texts supplied and answer the questions following them.

END of CHAPTER

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