Final Exam

Posted: Mon, Dec 1, 2025

Logistics

  • The final exam will be of the same format as the midterm, except we will have more time: Monday, December 15, 1:10–3:10pm, in Milbank Hall 328.
  • A comprehensive version of your course lexicon is due in hard copy at the end of the exam.
  • If you have accessibility needs, please don’t be afraid to discuss them with me. You are also welcome to take the exam with CARDS or Columbia’s disability services, and please reach out if you need help with the logistics.

Topics it would make sense to review

The intersection of ethics and epistemology

  • How the new literature on the ethics of knowledge/ignorance can be interpreted as a critique of the scope and methodology of traditional ethics.
  • Fricker vs. Ruíz on the nature, origin, and remedy of testimonial injustice.
  • Berenstain’s analysis of structural gaslighting.

Ideal vs. nonideal ethics

  • Mills’ account and critique of idealizing assumptions in traditional ethics.
  • Korsgaard’s interpretation of Kant’s argument that there is no right to revolution.
  • The moral significance of conceptual frameworks, starting points, and background assumptions.

Existentialist ethics

  • The slogan: “Existence precedes essence.”
  • The existentialist account of freedom.
  • The existentialist critique of traditional ethics.
  • Beauvoir’s development of existentialism using womanhood as a case study.
  • Beauvoir on the tension between being woman and being (hu)man.
  • The location of the philosopher: The spectator vs. the actor.

Possible Essay Prompts

Two of the following prompts will be selected to appear on the exam, and you will be asked to answer one of the two. An excellent essay will build on but go beyond our class discussions in some significant way. Aim for 500–700 words.

  1. To what extent are disagreements among first-order normative ethical theories disagreements on philosophical methodology?
  2. Most say that ethics is about what we ought to do and what sort of person we ought to be. If philosophy is an activity and the ethicist a sort of person, how well does ethics as a field itself withstand ethical scrutiny?
  3. The American Revolution—was it morally justified?