The midterm quiz will take place in class on Tuesday Oct. 22.  Although I do not expect the quiz to take very long to write, you can have as much of the class time as you need to write the quiz.  

The intent of the quiz is to see if you have grasped some of the basic concepts introduced in the lectures.  All the material relevant to the quiz is covered in the lecture notes available on-line, although you may find the textbook as useful supplement to those notes.  The quiz will not deal with material from the guest lectures by Edwin MacLellan, Kelly Hawboldt or James Sharpe.

All the questions on the quiz will be answerable in a few sentences or less (although you will not lose marks if you take longer to answer).  Most questions will require you apply one of the concepts covered in class.  The following is an example of this style of question, although not necessarily the difficulty of the questions:

1. Suppose someone offered the following explanation of why abortion is not morally wrong.  Which of the various ethical theories we have discussed (e.g., utilitarian, moral relativist, etc.) is it reasonable to think this person holds?  Explain.

Is abortion morally wrong?  No. We live in an age that values control over our lives above everything else.  We want to be able to pick our spouse, our career, our religion, our place of residence and so on.  Likewise, we want to have control over whether and when we have children.  In other times, different values may have operated and, in those times, the moral status of abortion may have been different, but in the present there is no doubt that abortion is morally OK.

A correct answer to this question would point out that this person seems to think that whether abortion is morally right or wrong depends on what the people of his era think and that he also seems to think that as popular opinion changes, the moral status of abortion will change.  This indicates that he is a moral relavitist (and, in particular, that he thinks morality is relative to time).