Midterm Exam

Posted: Wed, Oct 22, 2025

Logistics

  • Our midterm exam is Wednesday, October 29, in our usual classroom and during our usual class time.
  • The midterm version of your course lexicon is due in hard copy at the end of the exam. This is the cleaned-up version, which should be a glossary of terms with their definitions/explanations/verbal or non-verbal illustrations.
  • The exam is closed book and closed notes, except that you are allowed to consult your own course lexicon.
  • The exam will consist of four short answer questions and an essay question.
  • 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.

A few words about the point of the exam

  • I would rather we didn’t have any grades. There are colleges without grades, but Barnard is not one of them.
  • So I want us to make the most we can out of what we have to work with. The midterm exam for me is a tool for teaching, not testing: I don’t think of the exam as a “test” of my students’ learning; instead, I mean for it to be a planned break—like a lookout point—on a long journey so students can step back, gather themselves, and take time to revisit, absorb, and reflect on what we’ve covered so far.
  • And I’d like to make this a (relatively) fun experience as well! I know that an in-class “essay” sounds scary, but I’m not expecting a polished paper. Try to approach the prompt as a conversation starter: You’ve heard enough from me already; now the mic is yours and I’m really curious to hear your take! Imagine we are just hashing this out over brunch on a pleasant Saturday morning (if you still feel nervous, try imagining that you are talking to a friend who has not taken this class). Tell me what the problem space is like—what the issue is, where the constraints lie, how people have tried and failed—and how you are thinking about it.

Topics it would make sense to review

Here I’m organizing the readings/topics somewhat differently from how they are presented in the schedule. This is to introduce a second perspective that illuminates their connections.

Methodological issues

  • Armchair vs. socially engaged theorizing.
  • Top-down vs. bottom-up theorizing.
  • The interplay between cases and theory, as illustrated by the moral foundations of reproductive rights.
  • Ethics as technical manual vs. practical skill.
  • Ethics as centered on reason/principles vs. affect/care.
  • Ethics as intellectual vs. personal.
  • Ethics as relational vs. individualistic.
  • Ethics as particuarlist vs. generalist.

The conventional story: Consequentialism vs. deontology

  • Traditional aims of normative ethical theory: Explanatory power and action guidance.
  • Traditional question of normative ethical theory: The grounds of deontic status.
  • Traditional starting points of normative ethical theory: The good vs. the right.
  • Traditional foundations of morality: Human nature vs. rational nature.
  • Traditional battle line: Consequentialism vs. deontology, but also why we are drawing the line differently.
  • Utilitarianism as a specific version of consequentialism, and consequentialism as a specific version of an axiological theory of the right.
  • Two ways of imposing a deontological constraint on consequentialism: Doing vs. allowing harm; intending vs. merely foreseeing harm.
  • Kant on autonomy and the self-legislation of moral laws.
  • The categorical imperative and its formulations.
  • Problem cases for each view.

The challengers: Virtue ethics and care ethics

  • Aristotelian teleology and its application to ethics.
  • Happiness: Pleasure vs. eudaimonia.
  • The function argument, focusing on the connections between function (ergon), virtue (aretê), and eudaimonia.
  • Moral virtues: What they are and how to achieve them.
  • Annas’ developmental account of virtue ethics.
  • Noddings’s account of care ethics.
  • Jaggar’s critique of care ethics (as well as traditional moral theory).

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. On reflection, if you had to say what ethics meant to you, how would you sum it up?
  2. “[I]t is of the greatest practical importance not to make [moral] principles dependent upon the special nature of human reason . . . but instead, just because moral laws are to hold for every rational being as such, to derive them from the universal concept of a rational being as such, and in this way to set forth completely the whole of morals, which needs anthropology for its application to human beings” (Kant, Groundwork 4:411–12, emphasis omitted). Explain and assess.
  3. “[In the 1970s] mainstream ethics began to look very different: there was a dramatic turn in what could be done by academic philosophers under the name ‘ethics.’ The turn was due to the Vietnam War, which affected campuses across the country. Many moral philosophers came to believe that they had been at fault for failing to take concrete moral issues generally as seriously as they should have. Philosophers interested in ethics began publishing papers on topics that the standard philosophy journals had never published papers on before—we wrote on topics such as abortion, just war, the right to privacy, self-defense, and affirmative action and preferential hiring and the rights of women and minorities more generally. It was remarkable!” (Judith Jarvis Thomson, BC ’50) Discuss in light of our discussion of moral theory’s starting points and methodologies.
  4. To what extent does traditional moral theory reflect “the perspective of men from the professional, administrative, and managerial classes” (Jaggar, p. 183)?