In this capstone assignment, we ask you to put together all of the skills
you have developed with us over the course of the semester; skills in close reading, forming and evaluating arguments, and considering the role that
religious practice plays in human life.
We have looked at arguments for and against God’s existence, and we
have considered the role that Sacred Scripture plays in helping the
Church form her understanding of the human person. In particular, we
have encountered the claims that humans are created by God with an
inalienable dignity; that humans have lost their capacity to live fully
human lives due to original sin; and that God’s loving response to our fall
from grace consists in offering us a covenantal relationship perfected
through Christ’s life and death on the cross.
We have also considered rival views of the human person, according to
which humans are clever animals, motivated by self-preservation and
pity; that in our original state we enjoyed strength and the freedom of
immediacy between desire and action. As humans developed their
linguistic and technological capacities, we fell from freedom to slavery.
Self-regard and the development of property created masters and slaves;
the only way to rise to new and higher form of freedom and moral
equality is to create a just state, guided by the general will.
Your purpose in this essay is comparatively evaluate the
plausibility of these two views of the human person, the source
of our moral failings, and their remedy. These views are partially
competing with one another, but it might also be that a complete account
of the nature of human badness and its remedy will draw on both
traditions of thought.
This assignment will have three stages: develop an argument; respond to
an objection, and apply your view about evil and its remedy to a
contemporary situation. I spell out each step below. But I would
encourage you to begin thinking about this assignment with the third
step. The human drama has grand tragedies that span entire societies,
and small but no less meaningful dramas within families or individual
hospital wards. Reflecting on a single concrete instance of evil in human
life will help you to frame and reflect on the sources of that evil and its
remedies.
To do this, we want you to write a 5-8 page paper in which you:
Develop, out of our readings, the argument which you find most
plausible. Be sure to accurately cite and explicate central texts from our
course readings. When you are developing this argument, make sure that
you explain why you find its central claims plausible. To make an
argument you need to:
Stake a claim – present your thesis clearly
Spell out your basic idea in the form of an argument. Draw on the
resources of Chs. 1 or 6 from A Workbook for Arguments to ensure that
your argument clearly distinguishes premises from conclusions, and that
the premises support the conclusion.
Finally, identify the premises of your argument that might be
controversial. This leads into the next step of the paper – responding to
objections.
Respond to objection. Now, put yourself in the shoes of someone who
disagrees with you. Develop, from that perspective, an objection to the
account you have offered, and respond to it. Why does this objection
ultimately miss the mark? For example, if you find Rousseau’s account of
human badness and its remedy more plausible, consider how a Christian
theologian might object to this view, and respond to this objection.
Checkpoint: by the end of this stage of the paper, you need to make
sure you have engaged with both theological sources and a philosophical
source such as Hume or Rousseau in some detail (at least one full page
devoted to theological discussion and one full page devoted to
philosophical resources).
Finally, develop and apply your favored view to our contemporary life
and the failings we encounter in it. Identify a failing in society, and use
your favored view to explain why that failing exists, and what should be
done about it. This account will help advance both your understanding of
the argument, and show its plausibility in action.
