Consider Mill’s ‘greatest happiness principle’ or ‘principle of utility,’ and his account of how it functions as a moral standard, a “criterion of right and wrong” (1) as Mill puts it at the beginning of Utilitarianism. Explain the principle. How does Mill connect the principle to pleasure? How does he distinguish the pleasure that the principle of utility affirms from ‘base’ pleasures, and how does he argue that following the principle of utility does not amount to simple selfishness?
General Guidelines and Requirements for Papers:
You should take care that your writing is clear and says what you mean it to say fully and directly.
Make sure to address all parts of the question or prompt.
Papers should be reasonably close to the approximate word-count lengths in the assignments. Generally, if your paper is more than 10% over or under that approximate length, it is probably either underdeveloped or in need of some editing to condense it.
You should write for an audience who are generally acquainted with the texts you are discussing, with the aim of clarifying and deepening their understanding of those texts and their main ideas and/or of taking and defending your own position about the issues under discussion.
your goal will be to try to offer your own account of the ideas covered in these texts, explaining what those ideas are, their meaning, how they can be justified, what is important or significant about them and/or what you object to and think should be viewed otherwise. In all cases, you should provide reasons and evidence in support of your account or your assessment.
DO NOT write ‘book report’ style papers, where you spend a bunch of time giving basic background about the author or the texts in question. Make sure any background you do supply is directly relevant to the matters you are discussing, and is necessary to make them clea
DO NOT write in a tone that ‘hypes’ the author or text under discussion. Your goal should be to provide a sober, critical assessment, not make things sound great.
On textual support. In the course of your paper, it is important that you establish that the views you are attributing to the authors you are discussing are what they actually hold.
There are two ways of doing this.
In cases where the view can be adequately represented in a summary or paraphrase form, you can provide a citation to the place where the author expresses the view you are attributing to them.
In cases where the view needs to be exhibited in the author’s own words, you should quote and provide a citation. Quoting can be necessary for a number for reasons, such as precision (which is a good reason to use someone’s exact language in many cases), or because the interpretation of an author’s position on a certain point is controversial and you want to establish exactly what they say in order to support a specific characterization of their view, or because the view needs some explanation, which should start with a careful discussion of their own language.
Some further points:
When quoting, be sure to provide enough context and explanation of the text you are quoting to ensure that its meaning is clear and the reader can understand how it supports or illustrates what you are saying. (Sometimes just quoting will be enough, but often it will not be).
Remember, even when you are simply summarizing key ideas found in the text in your own words, you must provide citation references to aid the reader in locating discussion of those ideas in the original.
Finally, make sure that you have something of your own to say about the texts you quote or refer to beyond simply stringing together quotations or paraphrases of their content. Tell the reader why and how these texts are important, interesting, or how they illustrate a point you want to make.
Some other notes about philosophical writing:
It is common in philosophy to use first person constructions like ‘I will argue that…’ or ‘I believe that…’. You should feel free to do so, especially since it will almost surely make your writing clearer.
Philosophical writing relies to a great extent on consistency of terminological usage. Rather than seeking synonyms to avoid using ‘common’ words, or trying to rephrase another author’s formulation in ‘your own’ terms, it is better to use the words that first come to mind when trying to say something and to stick with (or close to) other people’s precise formulations when discussing their claims, especially if you have reason to believe that the language in question contains technical vocabulary – i.e., terms around which the author is developing their concepts.
Obviously, when using other people’s language, you should enclose what you are using in quotation marks and provide clear references for where they first made that formulation. And references should also be supplied for paraphrases, even when you are not directly quoting.
Papers should be formatted according to the Chicago Manual of Style ‘notes and bibliography’ guidelines, with no title page or abstract.
For examples, see http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html.
All papers must include complete and correct bibliographic information for all sources cited or consulted. This will always be listed in the footnotes, and may also need to be listed in a separate bibliography at the end of the paper.
If all sources you consulted in preparation of the paper are directly referenced in the footnotes (either as a result of quotation or paraphrase and citation), then you do not need to include a separate bibliography.
If, on the other hand, you consulted sources you did not reference in the footnotes, you must include a separate bibliography.
Footnotes should be created using the ‘insert footnote’ function on your word processing software, not as running footers or manually.
Every modern word processing program can do this, and knowing how to use this function is an important part of university level writing competency. The ‘help’ menu on your word processing software is a good place to start if you’re unsure what to do.
