This assignment is an essay that brings all of the knowledge and skills developed in this course to bear on a
single ethical issue. Each student will write an 1800-2000 word essay (not including footnotes, the title page,
table of contents, and bibliography) that combines the insights and arguments of the second and third
discussion boards into a single carefully-articulated work. Format should be 12pt, Times New Roman font and
in Turabian format.
Content
Begin your paper with a brief introductory paragraph that clearly states your goals, thesis, and method. State
what metaethical theory you are contrasting to a Christian ethic, the issue in applied ethics you are addressing,
the conclusion(s) on that issue that you want to defend.
Next, provide a lengthy and detailed comparative analysis of the two metaethical theories—Christian ethics
and another theory—showing which theory is stronger. This will likely reflect what you argued for in your
Discussion Board 2 thread and the feedback that you received from the professor and/or classmates who
responded to your thread. Here you can go into much more detail than you could in the Discussion Board,
which was limited to 600 words. If you use half of your paper on this section, then it will be roughly three to four
pages.
Next, proceed to the applied ethics issue that you discussed in your Discussion Board 3 thread. Here you
should greatly expand upon your argument. Add detail, nuance, and argumentation, providing a fairly complete
and comprehensive argument for how a Christian ethic would approach this issue. Or, if you defended an
alternate theory in DB 2, formulate an application based on that theory. You may illustrate the issue with reallife examples, but please do not fill your paper with anecdotes. You should anticipate possible objections to
your approach to the issue and respond to them in an objective and informed manner. (For ideas on how
others might object to your approach, a good place to begin would be your classmate’s reply to your DB3
thread, but you need not stop there. Your own imagination and the many books and articles that have been
published on issues in applied ethics can provide a wealth of possible arguments relevant to every issue.) You
are encouraged to use quotes from sources as a way to support your arguments, but quotes should not make
up more than one and a half pages of your essay.
Your final paragraph should reflect what you have argued in your thesis. It should recap what you have
accomplished and how you have accomplished it.