Rawls – Civil Disobedience
Assignment goals
The goal of the Critical Summary assignment was to improve your ability to read and understand a short passage of writing, summarize a passage accurately, and to offer a critical analysis of another person’s view or argument.
This Short Essay assignment will give you the opportunity to build on this foundation by working on the following philosophical skills:
• reading and understanding longer passages of philosophical writing
• accurately summarizing another person’s argument
• coming up with an objection to another person’s view or argument
• responding to objections to a philosophical argument
• developing a coherent philosophical dialectic
Assignment details
Your short essay should be 1800 words (plus or minus 10%), double-spaced, use standard font and margins, and have no cover page.
There is no single conventional form of citation in philosophy, but you should use an accepted citation style (e.g. Chicago, MLA, APA) to cite authors whom you directly quote or whose ideas you paraphrase.
Your essay should also include a bibliography or references section on the final page.
Submit your essay as a .doc or PDF file via the course webpage.
In your essay, you will respond to one of the following topics:
1. Practitioners of civil disobedience demonstrate fidelity to law, but political rioters do not.
Draw on Rawls’s theory of civil disobedience to explain why it can be important for those who break the law as a form of protest to express respect for the authority of the state, and say how, according to Rawls, protesters should go about expressing this respect. In your opinion, should those who break the law as a form of protest always attempt to demonstrate fidelity to law? If so, why? If not, why not?
2. John Stuart Mill argues that the state is never warranted in interfering with a person’s liberty in order to prevent harm to that person. In his essay ‘Paternalism,’ Gerald Dworkin disagrees with this claim.
What is Dworkin’s view about when the state is warranted in creating paternalistic laws, and how does he defend it? Raise at least one objection to Dworkin’s view. Is the objection successful? Why or why not?
Whatever topic you choose, your goal should be to develop a coherent dialectic of the kind
we find in most of the readings for the course. The goal is to try to get a philosophical conversation up and running in your paper which places your own voice alongside the voices of some of the authors we’ve read.
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