1.ESSAY: PICK ONE (1) of the claims or topics from the list below. In clear, simple language, present an analysis that draws on the concepts and positions discussed in class to illuminate the ethical dimensions of your topic. To get maximum credit, you will need to sustain a coherent argument in your essay, stating a specific claim about the topic and offering reasons why the reader should agree with you. Delete the prompts that you are not answering, and type your response beneath the prompt that you are responding to. Your response should be approximately 500 words long.
(i)“If you work hard and play by the rules, you will get ahead” (President Barack Obama). Critically analyze this claim. In what ways—if any—does this claim need to be qualified? Be sure to use some of the key terms, concepts, and/or authors we have discussed in our course in developing your answer.
(ii)In what ways does The New School succeed or fail at being an ethically run education business? If you were the President of The New School, would you change anything about how the university is run in order to make it more ethical? Be sure to use some of the key terms, concepts, and/or authors we have discussed in our course in developing your answer.
(iii)Consider this analogy from G.A. Cohen about “getting ahead” in contemporary capitalist soceity: Ten people are placed in a room the only exit from which is a huge and heavy locked door. At various distances from each lies a single heavy key. Whoever picks up this key—and each is physically able, with varying degrees of effort, to do so—and takes it to the door will find, after considerable effort, a way to open the door and leave the room. But if they do so they alone will be able to leave it. Photoelectric devices installed by a jailer ensure that it will open only just enough to permit one exit. Then it will close, and no one inside the room will be able to open it again. It follows that, whatever happens, at least 9 people will remain in the room. Only the person who exerts the most effort and is quickest and skilled enough will be able to leave the room, and the exercise of this person’s freedom to leave the room comes at the expense of the other 9 people who will remain trapped. Critically explain what this analogy says about social mobility in contemporary capitalist society. Is it an accurate and fair analogy?
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