A- or A: outstanding work. An A- or A paper meets all of the standards for a B+, but in addition:
- works out the original, striking, or powerful idea, argument, or illustration/application fully and deeply, with outstanding execution that demonstrates a firm grasp of the underlying concepts, principles, facts, and argumentative strategy
- alternatively, the paper might offer an unusually comprehensive survey of possible moves by both sides, and clearly and systematically evaluate them, coming to a closely reasoned conclusion. The survey must be systematic, not scattershot: it must develop the alternatives logically and to substantial depth, not just assess a random mix of ad hoc considerations. And it must consistently display an understanding of the underlying point of different arguments, what they are really getting at (not just a superficial swipe at them).
- alternatively, for a paper based on a text, the paper might offer an unusually sophisticated, close and systematic reading of a philosopher’s texts, paying attention to tensions and contradictions in the author’s work, alternative interpretations of passages (offering persuasive arguments for preferring one interpretation to another), and interpretations that bring out philosophically significant points, especially if they offer fresh, unconventional readings
Guidelines on Writing a Philosophy Paper (adapted with permission from and thanks to Mika Lavaque-Manty)
Philosophy writing is argumentative in structure. At its best, it achieves clarity by using ordinary language and avoiding overly complex sentence structures. Technical jargon should be used only when necessary. Write in a straightforward manner. Your style may be personal (it’s ok to say “I”) but should still be scholarly (no expletives or colloquialism). Keep the following considerations in mind:
1. Structure your paper around a thesis you intend to defend. Open your paper with a statement of your thesis, or if it is not obvious what your thesis would be about on a cold read, you may include minimal background context to make the meaning of the thesis clear. Then, explain how you will go about defending your thesis. This should all be done in the first paragraph or two. State your thesis in substantive, not merely formal terms. Don’t say “I will present an argument that shows that Rawls was wrong about distributive justice.” Don’t say “I will present two objections to Rousseau’s view.” Briefly state what you think is wrong with Rawls’s argument, or what your two objections to Rousseau are.
2. Focus on giving arguments for your position. Give complete arguments, making explicit your assumptions. The quality of papers is overwhelmingly determined by the strength of the arguments you offer for your position. Philosophy papers generally concentrate more on defending broad principles than on establishing particular contingent facts. However, in some cases, notably papers in applied ethics where you are defending a position about what actually ought to be done (not just about what ought to be done in some hypothetical circumstance or thought experiment), the actual facts may matter a lot to the outcome, and you should strive for empirical accuracy.
3. Avoid filler material that does not advance your argument. It’s pointless to write banalities like “philosophers have been wondering about the justification of punishment for thousands of years.” Don’t dress up your argument with fictional details (“It was a dark and stormy night, as Locke plotted revolution. . . ). Don’t write anything that does not advance understanding or argumentation.
4. Depth is better than breadth. It is more effective to develop one or two arguments for your thesis in depth, carrying them through several layers of objections and replies, than it is to give dozens of reasons for your thesis, none of which are developed with any seriousness.
5. Always consider objections to your position. Sound philosophy depends on taking seriously multiple points of view. Just offering arguments for your position, while ignoring objections, does not make a strong philosophy paper. Nor does it make for interesting philosophy to only consider weak or silly objections to your position. You should strive to consider the strongest objections you can think of to your position, as well as the objections most commonly voiced, if the position you advocate is one that has received wide discussion. It’s worth having a conversation with a thoughtful advocate of a position you disagree with, to engage with an opposed point of view. If you mention a point made by someone you had such a conversation with, you should credit that person in a note.
6. Think through the issue yourself, don’t just report what other people say. Philosophy assignments are more like mathematics problem sets than like book reports. They are exercises for your mind, to engage you in philosophical argumentation. If you got a problem set and just asked a mathematician for the correct answers, you wouldn’t really have learned any math for yourself. Similarly, if you are assigned a philosophy problem your primary task is to think it through for yourself, not to report back on what your favorite philosopher, or the best philosophers, have said on the matter. This is true even when your task is to interpret a text in the history of philosophy. Your task is to think yourself through to a philosophical understanding of the text, to give arguments that it should be interpreted in this particular way rather than that, rather than to simply summarize what commentators have said.
7. Give arguments, not mere opinions. Don’t say “I am an atheist, so Locke is wrong.” Construct an argument you think might have a chance of convincing your opponents. Remember, arguments are a form of communication: you want your opponent to understand you, and this often means looking for some common ground or ‘shared understandings’ to serve as a basis.
8. Write with a critical reader in mind – someone who isn’t initially sympathetic to your thesis, but who will listen to reason. You need not defend every assumption you make (most of us agree the Earth is round), but try not to assume something very controversial (“Since capitalism is obviously evil, there will never be social justice for all in the United States.”). As a rule of thumb, imagine your reader is another member of the class who disagrees with you and will challenge your points.
9. Acknowledge the limitations of your argument. No argument answers all difficulties. You are encouraged to identify problems and uncertainties in your argument that would require further research to resolve. Note that one way to make a contribution is to open up new questions for investigation that haven’t been answered yet, but that look like promising avenues for future investigation. It’s refreshingly honest to acknowledge the limitations of one’s work, and to turn this into an asset—an opportunity for future research.
10. Follow the principle of charity. If you are interpreting what someone else says, don’t impute an interpretation that makes that person sound like an idiot. Ask yourself, “how could this person have found this claim plausible”? This is a way of taking others seriously, of treating them with respect. In any event, it is of no philosophical interest to refute idiots.
11. If you want to attribute a view to someone we have read, make sure you interpret them carefully. On controversial points, cite textual evidence, either by quotation or by giving the page numbers of the relevant text in parenthesis or in a footnote. You must indicate when you are quoting or paraphrasing from someone else’s work, and you must cite texts and page numbers. This is particularly true for secondary material, if you choose to use some. (I recommend you don’t, though.) Refer to some accepted manual for appropriate ways to cite (MLA, Chicago, etc.). Any generally accepted style is OK, just stay consistent.
12. Acknowledge other debts as well. The general rule is that whatever is not a product of your own brain should be acknowledged. You might want to consult a brief guide on plagiarism. [These notes have been adapted, with permission, from notes by Mika Lavaque-Manty, which were in turn inspired by similar notes for philosophical writing by Ed Curley (Univ. of Michigan), Sally Haslanger (MIT) and Steve Yablo (MIT).]
12. Brief quotes can be helpful, especially when you attribute a claim or a position to some author. However, don’t overdo it: five, or seven, or 10 pages aren’t, after all, that much. The paper should be by and large in your own words.
13. Read over your paper after you have written it. Make sure you addressed the topic and made good of your initial promises. (Sometimes it makes sense to write your introduction last: Then you know what you have been able to argue for in the paper, and you won’t make promises you can’t keep.) Rewrite any parts which might be difficult to understand. Remember, you will be only given credit for what you actually say, not what you intended to say (but didn’t). No one can tell you are thinking clearly if you are not writing clearly. Correct errors in grammar, spelling and typing. Using a spell-checker is recommended, but not enough: proofread! Grammar, syntax and vocabulary matter.
14. Type neatly, retain copies of your papers, identify your paper clearly. Leave one inch margins all around and double-space for legibility. If you submit your paper electronically, make sure that the paper is in a standard document form– .doc, .rtf, .htm, .html, or .pdf –and that it is not encrypted in any way.
1. Nearly all criminal convictions in the United States are obtained through plea bargains. In a plea bargain, the prosecutor threatens to try a suspect for a crime carrying a high penalty in order to induce the suspect to plead guilty to a lesser charge, which carries a lower penalty. When more than one suspect is being tried for the same crime, standard procedure is to put them in a prisoner’s dilemma, to induce each alleged co-conspirator to accuse the others of the crime. Told that the others will testify against them, defendants nearly always agree to plead guilty. (a) Read Hobbes’s argument at I.14.30 closely. Does Hobbes accept these practices of plea bargaining, and obtaining guilty pleas by putting alleged co-conspirators in a prisoners’ dilemma? Explain his arguments. (b) Can you reconcile your interpretation with Hobbes’s argument in I.14.27? (c) How would U.S. prosecutors respond to Hobbes’s arguments? (d) How do you evaluate Hobbes’s arguments?
2. In the U.S., most local land use externalities are managed in two ways: zoning, and homeowners associations (HOAs). Zoning is undertaken by local governments, and typically regulates land use in relatively coarse-grained ways, such as separating industrial from residential uses. HOAs are private governments, with officers elected by association property owners, and often regulate land use in very fine-grained ways, such as limiting house and drapery colors, banning political signs, requiring grass lawns (as opposed to, e.g., xeriscaping), and HOA approval of garden plans. HOA regulations claim to focus on protecting the market value of neighboring properties by banning property uses that are thought to depress home values, often due to aesthetic considerations. Zoning often serves the same purpose, but is also often used to protect “the character of the community”–that is, shared ways of life. Recently, some HOAs have been banning rooftop solar panels even on roofs facing away from the street. And many agricultural communities have been banning large-scale solar and wind installations on farmland, claiming (among other externalities) that they undermine the agricultural character of the community. (a) Evaluate these wind and solar bans from the perspective of Locke’s theory of property. (b) Evaluate these bans from the perspective of Ellickson’s transaction cost “event size” analysis. (c) Compare the results of these two theories, and the normative considerations underlying them. Does either theory do a better job in reaching what you believe is the right conclusion, or in explaining why it is right? Is either theory missing out on normative considerations that should affect land use regulations regarding wind and solar energy?
3. Private property increases the freedom of individual owners relative to common property. But it also exposes individuals to higher risks, against which they may not be able to afford to insure themselves on the market. (Here is a neat explanation of how increasing risks suffered by an insurance pool can lead to an insurance market “death spiral.”) Social insurance was invented to cover such risks. However, climate change is causing crises even in publicly subsidized state insurance programs, such as flood insurance. Insurance compensates people for damages incurred for catastrophic events that have already happened. One alternative to natural disaster insurance is “managed retreat“: publicly subsidizing the movement of communities to locations outside the risk zone, before disaster has struck. (a) Can managed retreat be justified by Thomas Paine’s normative principles concerning property rights? Carefully consider Paine-style arguments both for and against managed retreat. Then answer one of the following questions. (b1) If you think some kind of managed retreat program can be justified on Paine’s principles, what constraints on or regulations of such programs would follow from his principles? (b2) If you think a managed retreat program cannot be justified on Paine’s principles, explain what normative principles should guide our thinking about public responses to mass climate catastrophes affecting particular communities within a state, and how they apply to managing flood risks in particular.
4. Rousseau famously opposed representative government. He argued that all laws should be passed directly by the people. (a) Explain and evaluate Rousseau’s argument against representative government. Do his objections apply to the U.S. today, at the federal or state level? (b) In the U.S. today, about half the states enable direct popular legislation by initiative (where citizens draft the law to be voted on), referendum (where the state government drafts the law to be voted on), or both. Do initiatives and/or referenda escape the problems Rousseau attributed to representation? Do they suffer from problems that representation can remedy? (c) In response to problems with representation as well as direct democracy of all the people, some theorists advocate lottocracy in the form of single-issue legislatures with members selected by lottery (similar to the way juries are constituted). In Michigan, citizens used the initiative to establish a quasi-lottocratic single-issue legislature to draw the representative districts for seats in Congress and the state legislature. (Their objective was to end gerrymandered districts, which rig elections to favor one political party over another.) (Ireland has adopted a mixed process, whereby proposals that win the favor of a lottocratic single-issue Citizen’s Assembly are put to the people in a referendum. Voters at large can view their meetings online, in which evidence and arguments for and against proposals are aired.) Evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of lottocracy relative to elected representative legislatures and direct democracy by all voters.
I have uploaded the guidelines and standards of the philosophy paper. You can choose between topics 1-4. The word limit is 1600. Thank you!