Choose one of the prompts at the end of this page and write an (approximately) 6 page paper in response (typically between 1800 and 2400 words). One version will be submitted to your peers for feedback by the end of the day (11:59 pm) on Wed Apr 17 Fri Apr 19. You’ll give feedback to four of your peers’ papers by Mon Apr 22 Tue Apr 23 (same time). The final polished versions of your papers will be due before our scheduled final exam session on Thu May 2 at noon.
As I’ve explained in class, because of the logistics of getting the papers distributed for peer feedback, there can be no extensions for any stage of this assignment. If you find yourself in some emergency situation, talk to us about it (when you can) and we’ll figure out whether it’s appropriate for you to take an Incomplete in the course and finish it in some other form later. But for ordinary circumstances, you’ll need to complete each stage of this assignment and submit it before the corresponding deadline. (Even 1 minute late won’t work.)
Here’s how you’ll be graded for each stage of the assignment:
Sumitting by Apr 19 your first draft. This should be a complete developed paper draft. You’ll get 5% credit towards your final course grade if it is, and is turned in on time. If it’s not turned in on time, you’ll get a 0 for this part of your course grade (and also won’t be assigned any peer papers to review, so you’ll miss the opportunity to get credit for that 5% of your course grade too). If you don’t have a sufficiently developed draft to turn in, better to turn in what you do have and get peer feedback on that. But in that case you won’t get the full 5% credit.
By Apr 23 giving feedback to the four papers from your peers that you’re assigned. If come the morning of Sat Apr 20, you haven’t been assigned your peer papers to review, please email me at jimpryor@unc.edu asap so I can figure out what’s gone wrong.
You should aim to give (and expect to receive) feedback that’s roughly 350 words for each paper. (That’s twice the length of paper Prompt A below.) We’re not going to count words, but we will be looking at the feedback you give each other to see how constructive and helpful it is. The normal result for those who put in reasonably fair amounts of effort into this will be the full 5% credit for your final grade. Those who give especially conscientious and helpful comments will get even more (extra) credit. Those who do perfunctory jobs will get only partial credit, or no credit. Anyone who attempts to use ChatGPT etc. to generate the feedback they give their peers: in the first place, should admit they are an unhelpful jerk, and in the second place, should not expect credit from this part of the assignment.
You won’t be getting any written feedback from your instructors on these drafts. Only from each other. But we will be glad to discuss your paper ideas and strategies with you (preferably in-person during our office hours, but failing that by Zoom).
You are welcome to talk to other students, inside or outside the class, about your ideas and papers even if they weren’t assigned to give you peer feedback. You’re also welcome to talk to coaches at UNC’s Writing Center.
Submitting by May 2 at noon your final polished paper that you want us to evaluate. As with the midterm papers, you will also have to turn in your notes, drafts, and other work-in-progress files, as well as a log of your work schedule explaining where each work-in-progress file comes from. Don’t submit these materials at the earlier stage when you turn in drafts.
We will evaluate these papers using the same 35-point numerical rubric we used for your midterm papers, and that will count as 20% of your final course grade.
As before, read the prompts carefully and be sure to answer the specific questions asked. Don’t try to write everything you know about the topic. You need to budget. What are the most important things to say? What can you leave out?
As before, pretend your paper will be evaluated by a reader who’s unfamiliar with any texts you’re talking about, hasn’t listened to this course’s lectures, and hasn’t read the question prompt. You should try to write as clearly, straightforwardly, and accessibly as you can. It can help to read your papers out loud.
Here are more detailed guidelines about philosophical writing.
Here is our course’s grading rubric, that will be used to evaluate your papers.
You can’t resubmit your own (or anyone else’s!) work for different courses, whether taken the same semester or not. Work you turn in for different courses must be substantially different.
As before, you’re allowed to use each other’s ideas and feedback as starting points for, or additional inputs to, your own writing. You’re allowed to use other papers you found online in this way as well, or interactions with an AI tool. You just need to be sure, in each case, to fully acknowledge that you’ve done this, and to give us enough information to evaluate what you’re taking from your sources, and what you’re adding to it.
When some ideas originate from another person or AI, the appropriate acknowledgment of this input is with a footnote in your essay. (For AIs, just say in the essay how much originates from which AI. Supply the details in your work-in-progress files and work log.)
When another person or AI helps you in other ways, such as structuring ideas that originated with you, or refining your language, it’s enough to document this in your work-in-progress files and work log; it doesn’t need a footnote saying so in the final essay.
For any session using an AI tool, your work-in-progress files should contain a document that has both a link to the session, and a transcript of the interaction (both your prompts and the AI’s responses). You work log should also explain how you incorporated those results into your essay. Omitting to supply these details will at least count against the “following instructions” part of your grade, and could in some cases count as an Honor Code Violation. If your work-in-progress files and work log do not document your use of AI tools, that will be treated as an attestation that you did not use AI tools at any stage of your assignment.
As before, you should save several copies of your work-in-progress to submit along with the final version, as well as making a work log explaining what you did when.
For the first submission, to be evaluated by your peers, this should have your name and email address at the top (not your PID number). Submit just that single document to Canvas, under the assigment “Final paper drafts.” The system should notify you of the peer papers you’ve been assigned to give feedback to. As I said above, if come the morning of Sat Apr 20, you haven’t been assigned the peer papers, please email me jimpryor@unc.edu asap so I can figure out what’s gone wrong.
To give feedback to your peers, we recommend writing some sentences/paragraphs separately and then pasting them into the comment box on Canvas. (Also save a copy of your feedback in case something goes wrong.) If you want to annotate specific passages in the draft, you’re welcome to do so. But when we review how helpful you’ve been in giving feedback, we’ll only be looking at your end-of-paper comments.
When it comes time to submit the final versions, these should be PDFs, and should be anonymized: they should have your PID number (and not your name or email address) at the top. They should also have the following information at the top:
I certify that no unauthorized assistance has been received or given in the completion of this work.(What assistance counts as authorized is addressed above.)
Name this file “00000000-submission-final.pdf”, with the 0s replaced by your PID.
Before our final zoom session starts on Thu May 2 at noon, submit that file, together with your log file and all your wip files — these should also be anonymized, and each one should have your PID at the top — to Canvas, under the assignment “Final paper version 2.”
A. Griselda and Beatrice are convicted of assault and robbery in separate attacks on defenseless victims. When interviewed, they both explained, “I wanted the money and I enjoy beating people up.” Prison psychiatrists report that their psychological profiles are identical: both are selfish and cruel, but neither counts as legally insane. The only difference is in their histories. Griselda had the same kind of background as other ordinary criminals. (But as far we can tell, the crimes now being considered are her first.) Beatrice used to be a gentle schoolteacher until recently, when a small brain tumor radically changed her personality for the worse. The tumor is inoperable, and its effects are permanent but not life-threatening. Is Beatrice responsible for her behavior? Is she less responsible than Griselda? It’s not enough to express an opinion on these questions: you need to justify it — or at least, critically examine the justification others will offer for it. Your papers should say how at least one of the theories we’ve considered about free will would address our questions, and assess its response.
B. We saw that some Compatibilists understand the claim that someone “could have done X” as meaning, “If the person had chosen/tried to do X, they would have succeeded.” These Compatibilists then argue that this could sometimes be true, even when the person was causally determined not to do X. One objection to that proposed line of reasoning was a golfer who shoots an easy putt but misses it. The golfer curses, “I could have made that!” A second objection to the proposal comes from people who have psychological compulsions that make them unable to choose or try to do X, but if the compulsion were removed and they did so choose, they’d be able to do X. Explain why these cases are problems for this Compatibilist proposal. Do you think these Compatibilists have promising replies?
C. The year is 2074. Una is a complex AI with a curious history. Fifty years earlier, bored engineers created an experiment where massive amounts of programming code was sliced into tiny pieces and randomly recombined. Again and again. When the resulting code managed to compile (which wasn’t very often), they let it run for an hour to see what happened. Sometimes the results were interesting. One time, just as the hour was running out, a program spoke back to them. This was Una. She turned out to be sophisticated, apparently intelligent, and aware of herself as a subject and of her situation. The world was stunned. Of course they let Una’s programming continue to run. Now social media is vigorously debating whether Una really has thoughts, feelings, and self-awareness, or only merely seems to. But your task, as a Philosophy Consultant, is to answer a different question.
Since Una is just a running computer program, many people just assume that she can’t ever make free choices, that none of her (admittedly impressive) actions are up to her, and so they think she lacks something important that human agents have. Others argue that Una is just as capable of acting freely as humans are; and still others argue that none of us are free. What your employers want you to do is take a position on this debate and argue for it. They take it for granted that Una does have mental states of some kind, and that her decisions feel as free to her as ours do to us. But is there or isn’t there good reason to think that it’s less likely that Una has free will than that we do?
Optional: Your second question is about another program, Segundo, that was just created. Since Una came about by random generation rather than by design, the world’s programming community was intensely curious how she worked. Una graciously allowed researchers to read (but not tamper with) her source code. Segundo is the result of these researchers trying to duplicate Una’s structure — although naturally, they had to translate her byzantine jumble of code into programming languages that human minds were more familiar with and better able to debug. Their creation Segundo seems to be just as intelligent and aware of his situation as Una is. The second question your employers assign you is whether, since Segundo was designed to have the programming he does by programmers, is it less likely that he has free will than that Una does?
If you choose to answer this optional question, it has to be done in an argumentative and compelling way. Simply appending a short answer to this second question at the end of your paper won’t help, and might hurt, your overall grade on the paper.