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SAEL 200
ESSAY 1: Reasoning About an Ethical Issue
This essay, Reasoning About an Ethical Issue, is situated between the first and second
speech, Imagining Advocacy and Discovering an Issue. It should serve partially as a
transition from the one to the other. In the Discovering an Issue speech you are looking to
establish what some of the competing facts, values, interpretations and interests are in the
problem you selected, defining who the stakeholders are, and setting up what is at issue
between competing groups. Here you are beginning that work by investigating the moral
dimensions of the problem that make it difficult of resolution without trying to establish
a resolution.
What we are finding in our readings is that neither the theoretical foundation for ethical
judgments is settled, nor are the meanings given to any of the important values on which
many of our ethical judgments hinge. In this essay you have the opportunity to make
clear how ethical concerns and values, both theoretical and practical, provide context for
the problem and more than likely exist in a kind of problematic tension.
Please continue to avoid arguing for a solution at this point. But you should try and
persuade your reader about which theories and values give the problem an ethical
dimension, clarify the meaning of those theories and values, and explain how the tension
in those values makes difficult an easy or ready solution (even if you think you have
