Week 10 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 10 — Where Morality Comes From: Testing Three Challenges — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Philosophy Free sample edition

Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 9 of the term — credit this week's sources correctly, key three arguments about morality for validity, state cultural relativism, divine command theory, and ethical egoism at their strongest, and explain the difference between two kinds of egoism to someone new to philosophy.

This week you learned descriptive and normative questions, Hume's is-ought problem, cultural relativism in two forms, the reformer objection, divine command theory and the Euthyphro dilemma, psychological and ethical egoism, and the ring of Gyges. In Week 1 you learned the Socratic habit of testing a definition with a counterexample, and in Week 2 you learned standard form, validity, and the valid and invalid forms. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Philosophy Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles; this assignment is where you put them together.

The task

You will use this week's pinned sources, the ring of Gyges (the Week 10 entry on the course's thought-experiment roster), and Dataset B, the argument set (illustrative). Dataset B's premises are written for teaching and are not claims the course endorses; the course keys its arguments for validity only, never for soundness, because the premises are open questions. The everyday cases below were written for this assignment; they are illustrative and describe no real person or place.

Part A — get the sources right, then reconstruct. A post on a study-group forum reads: "Socrates' ring of Gyges story proves that people are only good when someone is watching, and Hume's Euthyphro dilemma proves that religion is wrong. Anyway, cultures disagree about morals, so morality is relative." Do four things:

Correct the post. Say who tells the story of Gyges and in which book of which work; say what question the story asks, and why "proves that people are only good when someone is watching" overstates it; say who asks the Euthyphro question and in which dialogue; and say why the dilemma is a question about what makes acts right rather than an attack on religion.
Reconstruct the move to relativism. Write the post's last sentence in standard form ("Moral beliefs differ from culture to culture. So what is right is whatever each culture believes is right."), key it for validity as it stands with a one-sentence reason, then add the premise that would make it valid, mark it "(added)", name the resulting form, and say which premise now carries the weight and why the is-ought problem bears on it.
Key argument 10. Write Dataset B's argument 10 in standard form ("Most people in this town favor the law. So the law is just."), key it for validity with a reason, and build one same-shape argument of your own, on a new topic, whose premise is true and whose conclusion is false.
Reconstruct psychological egoism. Write the course's reconstruction of the argument for psychological egoism in standard form, mark the premise the reconstruction adds as "(added)", name the form, and say whether it is valid. Then name the premise its critics reject and say why, in one or two sentences.

Then work this problem, showing your reasoning:

Dataset B, the course's argument set, holds 10 arguments, and 6 of them are keyed valid. How many are keyed invalid?

Part B — weigh the three challenges. Work this problem first, showing your reasoning:

Cultural relativism has 2 forms, the Euthyphro dilemma has 2 horns, and egoism has 2 forms. How many claims is that to tell apart in all?

Then do two things:

State the three challenges at their strongest. State normative cultural relativism, divine command theory, and ethical egoism each as its best defenders would. For relativism, give the reformer objection and the relativist's reply. For divine command theory, write the Euthyphro dilemma in standard form, name its form, key it for validity, and give the reply from God's good nature. For ethical egoism, give its enlightened form, its strongest objection, and a reply from the egoist's side.
Name the disagreement. End with one plain sentence naming exactly where the three challenges disagree.

Explain it to a non-expert

A cousin who has never taken philosophy says, "Everyone is selfish deep down, so you should look out for yourself too." Write a 3–5 sentence message in everyday words that separates the two claims in that sentence, explains why the first does not prove the second, and names one honest limit of your explanation. Explain any term your cousin might not know.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a roommate who asks what a thought experiment is for. Model answer: "A thought experiment is an imagined case we use to test an idea, the way a pilot practices in a simulator before flying. We picture the case carefully and ask what we would say about it. If our answer clashes with a claim we believed, the claim needs another look. One limit: our gut reaction to an imagined case can be wrong too, so the case starts an argument rather than ending it."

Use that pattern for your message to your cousin, with your own explanation of the two kinds of egoism.

Revise and reflect

Put your first draft away for a few hours, then reread it against Chapter 10. For the correction, check each speaker, work, and book against the chapter's record; for each reconstruction, underline any added premise and check the form's name against Week 2's list; for your counterexample, confirm that its premise is true and its conclusion false; for each challenge, ask whether its best defender would sign your statement of it; and check that your cousin message keeps a claim about what people do apart from a claim about what they ought to do. Make at least one change and keep both versions. Then answer one of these two options in 2–4 sentences; they carry the same weight:

(a) Which change made your sourcing or one of your reconstructions more exact, and which definition or pinned fact showed you it was needed?
(b) Which change made your statement of one of the three challenges stronger, and what had you left out at first?

Deliverables

Submit one document or recording that contains, in this order:

your Part A forum-post correction, your reconstruction of the move to relativism with its added premise, your keying of argument 10 with your counterexample, your egoism reconstruction with the premise critics reject, and your first count;
your Part B count, the three challenges with their objections and replies, your Euthyphro reconstruction, and your plain sentence;
your message to your cousin;
your first and revised versions of the part you changed, and your reflection.

Choose how you show it. Present your work as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about five minutes with a transcript. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the correction, the reconstructions, the evaluation, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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