Truman, Kant and Kohlberg: eight ethics questions

The instruction to write one paragraph on each question is a constraint on scope rather than a suggestion, and it is worth obeying literally, and the eight questions are ordered so that each supplies material for the next. Hiroshima is the standard test case because the utilitarian and Kantian verdicts come apart cleanly: a consequentialist calculation weighing projected invasion casualties against the deaths caused can reach a positive verdict, while the Kantian objection is that using civilians as a means to end a war violates a constraint no calculation can outweigh. Anscombe's argument matters because she is not merely disagreeing about the arithmetic — she is insisting that deliberately killing the innocent is murder regardless of outcome, which is why she opposed Truman's honorary degree at Oxford. Naming that episode shows you know the argument rather than the summary of it, and it takes one clause to do.

For the middle questions, precision is what earns marks. Kant derives the categorical imperative from reason rather than sentiment because a moral law grounded in feeling would bind only those who happen to feel it; his argument against lying is famously absolute and famously awkward, since the murderer-at-the-door case is where absolutism collides with another apparent duty. Say what is problematic about it rather than only reporting that critics object. Retribution follows from treating persons as ends — punishment respects the offender as a rational agent who chose, whereas rehabilitation treats them as an object to be corrected. Then handle Kohlberg carefully: Amy and Jake respond to the Heinz dilemma differently, and Gilligan's objection is that Kohlberg's scale scores Amy's relational reasoning as less developed when it is a different orientation rather than a lower stage. That distinction is the whole of question seven, and getting it wrong turns Gilligan into the opposite of what she argued.