ETHC 101 CAPSTONE ESSAY INSTRUCTIONS

Summary

The final assignment for ETHC101 is a capstone essay that brings all of the knowledge and skills developed in this course to bear on a single ethical issue. Each student will write a paper of 2100 to 2400 words (total, including the title page, table of contents, quotations, footnotes, and bibliography), in current Turabian format, that combines the insights and arguments of the third and fourth discussion boards into a single carefully-articulated work.

Content

Begin your paper with a brief introductory paragraph that clearly states what positions you are going to argue for. State what metaethical theory you will utilize, the issue in applied ethics to which you will be applying it, and the conclusion(s) on that issue that you want to defend.

Next provide a lengthy and detailed explanation of your metaethic. This will likely reflect the metaethic that you argued for in your Discussion Board Three thread and the feedback that you received from the professor and/or classmates who responded to your thread. Here you can go into much more detail than you could in the Discussion Board, which was limited to 600 words. If you use half of your paper to develop your metaethic, then it will contain approximately 1100 words, which means that it will be roughly twice as long as your Discussion Board thread was. As in Discussion Board Three, in your explication of your metaethic you must interact with the ethical theories that we have studied in this course.

            Once you have fully explicated and argued for your metaethic, proceed to an application of that metaethic to the applied ethics issue that you discussed in your Discussion Board Four thread. This discussion may end up being twice as long as your discussion board thread was. Add detail, nuance, and argumentation, providing a fairly complete and comprehensive argument for approaching the issue the way that you do. You may illustrate the issue with real-life examples, but please do not fill your paper with anecdotes. You should anticipate possible objections to your approach to the issue and respond to them in an objective and informed manner. (For ideas on how others might object to your approach, a good place to begin would be your classmate’s reply to your DB4 thread, but you needn’t stop there. Your own imagination and the many books and articles that have been published on issues in applied ethics can provide a wealth of possible arguments relevant to every issue.)

            Your final paragraph should reflect that you have accomplished your thesis. It should recap what you have accomplished and how you have accomplished it.

Research

This paper is not required to utilize any sources outside of those that were used in the class (the two textbooks, the videos, and the PointCast presentations), but use of additional resources is permitted and encouraged. At the minimum the paper should utilize the resources from the class. All resources used must be listed in the bibliography and any resources quoted, paraphrased, or alluded to must be documented via footnotes formatted according to Turabian.

            While your footnotes and bibliography (if you had one) did not count toward the word count for your discussion boards, for this capstone essay both the footnotes and the bibliography count toward the word count. In other words, the 2400 word limit is all-inclusive. You will be penalized if you exceed the limit, so please do not.

Format

Your paper must begin with a title page that includes a paper title, your name, the date, and the course name and number. The second page of your paper must be a table of contents. The last page of your paper must be devoted to your bibliography. The paper must utilize 12 point Times New Roman font, double-spaced, with one inch margins. It must be double-spaced rather than triple-spaced between paragraphs and there should be only one space after the end of each sentence.

Any documentation in the body of your paper must be done via footnotes formatted according to Turabian. If you are not familiar with how to do this, simply look it up online. There are many websites that explain Turabian formatting. Footnotes should be single-spaced 10 point Times New Roman font.

Your paper must be submitted as a Microsoft Word document. If you submit it as a .pdf or anything other than a Microsoft Word document it will not be graded.

Format Example

Title Page

Table of Contents

Body of Paper:

·         Introduction

·         Metaethic

·         Application

·         Conclusion

Bibliography

Miscellany       

Proofread your work before handing it in! Errors of spelling, grammar, syntax, and punctuation will affect your grade. This is a university-level writing assignment. Please write accordingly.

            The deadline for this assignment is 11:59pm on Friday of Unit 8. Submit your finished paper via the SafeAssign link on Blackboard. SafeAssign is a program that checks your work for plagiarism. Plagiarism is immoral, unchristian, and will not be tolerated. The consequences for plagiarism are significant and SafeAssign makes it easy to detect. If you are not sure what plagiarism is, it is your responsibility to find out. Ignorance is no excuse. Do not plagiarize!

            This assignment contributes to achieving and assessing the achievement of all four of the Course Learning Outcomes.
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