Assignment:
1. Your paper should bring together scientific and technical knowledge with moral principles, i.e. you must discuss what the situation is, what we can do, and what we ought to do.
2. Your paper should focus upon a specific environmental problem.
3. You should provide a well-reasoned moral argument in support of a proposal for public policy, that is a policy that could be enacted into law to address the environmental problem upon which you have focused.
4. Your paper must have a specific and interesting thesis, clearly stated in the first paragraph. Your thesis should briefly state the environmental problem you will discuss, the policies you will support, and their connection to the moral principles you will use in your moral argument. For example, "In this paper I will argue that we have a moral duty not to impose on others the costs of what we purchase without their knowledge or consent, as happens when industries manufacture products in ways that pollute the environment and cause ill health in citizens. I will show that there are two policies that would alleviate this problem: green taxes can be used to adjust the prices of goods to reflect their true costs, and requiring full-cost accounting will enable citizens to know the social costs being imposed upon them by industries. From this it follows that our government has a moral duty to enact these policies."
5. Other Requirements:
In all your writing assignments you are required to follow the basic rules which govern any discussion of a text. That is, when you discuss or refer to some portion of a text you are required to provide textual references according to the standards of the MLA, citing the specific page or pages on which that portion of the text is to be found. This is necessary for two reasons:
(1) unless you provide such a citation you are not giving credit to the author of the ideas you discuss, and this is plagiarism,
(2) by citing the specific page you are discussing you are giving evidence on behalf of your interpretation and providing the reader with the means of checking that interpretation for accuracy.
Response should be 8 to 10 pages.