Q&A Hero

Q: The view that war is never morally permissible is known as jus in bello.

Q: Suppose your culture endorses the view that all wars are wrong. It follows from cultural relativism that your culture a. cannot be mistaken about the morality of war. b. must disagree with other cultures about the morality of war. c. is fallible about the morality of war. d. does not participate in wars.

Q: The component of the Affordable Care Act called the individual mandate required that individuals have a. two-tiered health insurance. b. basic health insurance, with some exceptions. c. basic health insurance, with no exceptions. d. health savings accounts (HSA).

Q: In 2014 President Barack Obama claimed that the United States should intervene in an attack on the Yezidi people in Iraq by ISIS in order to prevent genocide. An interventionist might argue that the United States was justified in such an attack, just as a bystander would be permitted to intervene if they were to see an innocent person being threatened. Which of the following would be the best response that the noninterventionist could give to the interventionist argument? a. There is a well-established doctrine of international conduct that one sovereign state may not meddle in the internal affairs of another. b. Just as a bystander must ask for help in order to justify intervention, the Yezidi people must also ask for help, which they cannot do. c. A leader of government may not make decisions that will put soldiers in danger, simply for the sake of preventing genocide. d. Preventing genocide is not a legitimate reason for any nation to engage in aggression.

Q: What does cultural relativism imply about the civil rights leader and social reformer Martin Luther King Jr., considered as part of 1950s1960s United States culture? a. He was a product of his culture. b. He was wrong about his moral reforms. c. He was neither right nor wrong about his moral reforms. d. He was objectively right but relativistically wrong about his moral reforms.

Q: The idea behind ________ is that in any society, morality demands that people receive what they are due (what is fair). a. natural law theory c. distributive justice b. the ethics of care d. procedural justice

Q: Consider the ticking-bomb scenario, which is used to justify using torture to fight terrorism. Some who are opposed to torture believe that ticking-bomb scenarios are too contrived to be taken seriously; such states of affairs simply dont happen in the real world. A plausible counterargument to this position is that a. ticking-bomb situations happen all the time. b. ticking-bomb situations have often been depicted in movies and TV series. c. in light of what we know about the upbringing of many convicted terrorists, we have good reasons to believe that ticking-bomb situations are possible. d. in light of what we know about terrorist tactics and aims (and about police cases that resemble ticking-bomb scenarios), we have good reasons to believe that ticking-bomb situations are possible.

Q: For a cultural relativist, when two people in the same culture disagree on a moral issue, what they are really disagreeing about is a. the strength of the arguments presented. b. nonmoral issues. c. objective moral truth. d. whether their society endorses a particular view.

Q: Theories of justice that hold that people are entitled only to what they can freely acquire through their own legitimate efforts in a free market are called ________ theories. a. socialist c. liberal b. egalitarian d. libertarian

Q: Suppose you took a Kantian means-ends view of torture. You then would likely judge torture to be a. morally permissible. c. neither right nor wrong. b. morally impermissible. d. permissible to save lives.

Q: Which statement best summarizes why, according to the author, cultural relativism is nearly impossible to use? a. Each of us belongs to only one society, and so we cannot know what people in other societies believe. b. Each of us belongs to multiple societies or social groups, but cultural relativism does not specify which society or group we should use in evaluating actions. c. It is often impossible to know whether your culture approves of a given action. d. The theory makes it impossible to convince other people of moral claims.

Q: Much of the health care in the United States is delivered through ________, a type of health insurance in which providers contract with an HMO, PPO, or POS to offer health care to a group of patients at discounted costs. a. managed care c. telemedicine b. private insurance companies d. subsidized insurance

Q: Suppose you are a utilitarian, and suppose it is an empirical fact that wars invariably have more bad consequences than good. To be consistent, you then would have to accept the view known as a. personal pacifism. c. realism. b. just war pacifism. d. antiwar pacifism.

Q: The term used to refer to the issue of what acts are morally permissible in war is ________. a. jus in bello. c. ad hoc jus. b. jus ad bellum. d. jus ad majorum.

Q: Objectivists argue that the diversity of moral judgments across cultures does not necessarily indicate that there is disagreement about moral beliefs, but instead may indicate that a. the moral beliefs do not matter. c. nonmoral beliefs do not differ. b. there are divergent nonmoral beliefs. d. disagreement is not possible.

Q: A ________ argument against euthanasia would assert that mercy killing involves treating persons as mere things of no more value than a beast and is therefore wrong.

Q: Suppose the Iraq War, which began in 2003 when the United States and its allies attacked Iraq, started because President George W. Bush and his advisors feared that Saddam Hussein might be dangerous. And suppose at that time there was no evidence that Iraq was an immediate and imminent threatthat is, there was no evidence that Iraq had nearly completed plans to attack the United States with weapons of mass destruction. If these were the facts, most just war theorists would probably have judged the attack by the United States to be a. preemptive. c. unjustified. b. justified. d. prudent.

Q: Which feature of emotivism makes it different from subjective relativism? a. In emotivism, moral judgments vary from individual to individual. b. In emotivism, some of our feelings about actions are objectively justified. c. In emotivism, we are not able to have disagreements in our moral beliefs. d. In emotivism, we do not automatically have true beliefs about right and wrong.

Q: Medical treatment, disease prevention, emergency care, and public health measures are collectively referred to by the term a. health care. c. Medicare. b. fiduciary care. d. managed care.

Q: Suppose that terrorism is defined broadly as the deliberate use of violence against noncombatants for political or ideological purposes. In this case the Allied bombings of Dresden and other German cities in World War II and the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be considered a. acts of war. c. terrorist acts. b. nonterrorist acts. d. unclassifiable actions.

Q: Suppose a culture approves of beheading a young man for merely holding hands with a woman. According to cultural relativism, the beheading is a. neither justified nor unjustified. c. morally justified. b. morally unjustified. d. objectively justified.

Q: The fundamental moral issue involved in the health care debate is justice, which is about persons getting what is fair or what is their due. One of the ways we can ensure justice in health care is to preserve the principle that requires that equals be treated equally unless there is a morally relevant reason for treating them differently. This principle is called a. egalitarianism. c. the means-ends principle. b. the greatest happiness principle. d. impartiality.

Q: The leading contemporary advocate for just war theory, Michael Walzer, asserts that terrorism is wrong because a. terrorists always act from dubious motives. b. it is an indiscriminate attack on the innocent. c. terrorist attacks are directed at specific persons for particular reasons. d. it is perpetrated by nonstate actors.

Q: Cultural relativism implies that the abolition of slavery in the United States a. represents moral progress. b. may or may not represent moral progress. c. cannot be explained. d. cannot be regarded as moral progress.

Q: The health insurance program supported jointly by the federal and individual state governments that covers low-income families, pregnant women, families and children, and people with disabilities is named a. Social Security. c. Medicaid. b. Medicare. d. Home Health Care.

Q: Luann believes that the best definition of death says that an individual is dead when those brain functions that give rise to consciousness permanently stop. She advocates for the ________ definition of death.

Q: People who should not be intentionally attacked in war are said to have a. war immunity. c. noncombatant immunity. b. state protection. d. special status.

Q: In 2005 the Netherlands passed a law that allows parents to choose to intentionally end the lives of their newborns, provided that five criteria, including the presence of unbearable suffering, are met. If we assume that newborns are persons, such a law has its basis in natural law theory.

Q: According to the main argument for cultural relativism, if culture X and culture Y disagree about the morality of physician-assisted suicide, this shows that a. right and wrong are not relative to cultures. b. physician-assisted suicide is permissible. c. either culture X or culture Y must be correct. d. no view can be objectively correct.

Q: Subjective relativism implies that when Sofia says, I think abortion is wrong, and Emma replies, I think abortion is permissible, Sofia and Emma are a. having a moral disagreement. c. not having a moral disagreement. b. really saying the same thing. d. not entirely serious.

Q: If someone argues that euthanasia is permissible because it maximizes happiness, she would be taking a ________ view of the matter.

Q: If you were an American physician who accepted the active-passive distinction, you would also likely believe that, whereas euthanasia is always wrong, in some cases physician-assisted suicide may be permissible.

Q: A plausible nonconsequentialist argument for pacifism is a. war is always wrong because in the deliberate killing of human beings it violates a fundamental rightthe right to life. b. war is never justified, because it always produces more bad than good. The catastrophic loss of life and the widespread destruction of war can never offset whatever political or material gains are achieved; riches, land, oil, or power cannot outweigh the carnage. c. war inevitably leads to more war, and multiple wars can never outweigh the good that might come out of so many conflicts. d. the loss of even one life in a war is so catastrophically bad that no amount of good resulting from the war could counterbalance it.

Q: Subjective relativism implies that when a person states their moral beliefs, that person is a. incapable of making moral judgments. b. incapable of being in error. c. morally fallible. d. infallible on some moral judgments, but not others.

Q: Directly or indirectly bringing about the death of another person for that persons sake is known as ________.

Q: Eminent realists of the past and present include a. Niccol Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Henry Kissinger. b. Henry Kissinger, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Jimmy Carter. c. Reinhold Niebuhr, Thomas Hobbes, and Barack Obama. d. Niccol Machiavelli, George W. Bush, and Henry Kissinger.

Q: Both objectivists and cultural relativists agree that a. the truth of moral judgments depends on whether ones culture approves of them. b. moral judgments differ from culture to culture. c. moral judgments do not differ from culture to culture. d. the truth of moral judgments does not depend on whether ones culture approves of them.

Q: In ________ euthanasia, the patient requests or agrees to have his or her death hastened.

Q: In just war theory, the justification for resorting to war has traditionally been labeled a. jus in bello. c. justice of conflict. b. just cause principle. d. jus ad bellum.

Q: Which statement is a consequence of objectivism? a. Moral rules apply in all cases, without exceptions. b. If two people have a moral disagreement, only one of them can be right. c. Everyone has the same beliefs about morality. d. Whether an action is objectively right depends on its consequences.

Q: When a persons death is caused by his or her own hand with the help of a physician, this is known as ________.

Q: Suppose state A launches an unprovoked attack on state B. According to the usual interpretation of just war theory, state B has just cause for going to war against state Anamely a. revenge. c. expectation of success. b. self-defense against attack. d. profits in war.

Q: Cultural relativists may believe their theory promotes tolerance of other cultures. However, the author argues against this. Which statement best summarizes his argument? a. Cultural relativists really only value the practices of some cultures, not all cultures. b. Subjective relativists and emotivists can also promote tolerance. c. Tolerance is not really a good thing, and so cultural relativists should not support it. d. Cultural relativists cannot consistently say that tolerance is objectively good.

Q: It is the case that active euthanasia is legal in the United States and widely believed to be morally acceptable.

Q: Consider this rule-utilitarian argument against legalizing euthanasia: Passing a law to permit active voluntary euthanasia would inevitably lead to abuses such as more frequent use of nonvoluntary euthanasia and unnecessary killing; therefore, no such law should be passed. Such an argument is characterized as a. abductive. c. a slippery slope. b. Kantian. d. equivocation.

Q: Objectivism is the view that a. moral principles are rigid rules that have no exceptions. b. there are no objective moral principles. c. some moral principles are valid for everyone. d. moral utterances are neither true nor false.

Q: According to the dominant reading of natural law theory, euthanasia is wrong primarily because a. it amounts to using a person as a means and not as an end. b. it always results in less overall happiness. c. we have a moral duty to preserve life. d. scripture condemns it.

Q: The obligation to ease the agony of another when we can do so without excessive cost to ourselves is called the duty of ________. a. maleficence c. cooperation b. beneficence d. justice

Q: Some opponents of active euthanasia argue that euthanasia is uncalled for; a dying patient in the grip of unimaginable pain, for example, does not have to be killed to escape her agony. Modern medicine offers dying patients unprecedented levels of pain relief. A common reply to this argument is a. although it is possible to manage even severe pain well, too often pain is not well managed. b. in arguments about euthanasia, pain is irrelevant. c. although it is possible to manage even severe pain well, physicians do not try to do so. d. pain is a fact of life that patients must learn to live with.

Q: The principle of autonomy (the right of self-determination) can be used to argue for a. active euthanasia. b. a ban on active euthanasia. c. the Roman Catholic view of active euthanasia and suicide. d. restrictions on autonomy for dying patients.

Q: A key premise in the argument for active euthanasia is that the right of self-determination includes the right of competent persons to decide the manner of their dying. This premise is a. accepted by virtually all parties to the euthanasia debate. b. clearly false. c. incoherent. d. controversial.

Q: In 2009 Jeffrey Locker was found tied up in his car and dead as a result of multiple stab wounds. Kenneth Minor was arrested and charged with his murder, but Minor claimed that Locker had hired him to assist in his death so that his family could receive a life insurance payment that would eliminate Lockers large debts. Assume that Minors claim was true. A natural law theorist would determine that Minors action was a. morally permissible, because it was a legitimate application of the doctrine of double effect. b. morally impermissible, because it was not a legitimate application of the doctrine of double effect. c. morally permissible, because Jeffrey had consented and Minor had respected his autonomy. d. morally impermissible, because the law does not allow for citizens to assist others in committing suicide.

Q: In 2002, the eighty-six-year-old war hero Admiral Chester W. Nimitz Jr., in a suicide pact with his eighty-nine-year-old wife, ended his life with an overdose of sleeping pills. According to a news report, Having lost 30 pounds from a stomach disorder, suffering from congestive heart failure and in constant back pain, the admiral had been determined to dictate the hour of his death. His wife, who suffered from osteoporosis so severe her bones were breaking, had gone blind. She had no desire to live without her husband. Assuming this is an accurate account of Admiral Nimitzs motivations, to what moral principle did he appeal to justify taking his own life? a. justice c. right to life b. beneficence d. autonomy

Q: Imagine a situation in which a patient is not competent and has left no instructions regarding end-of-life preferences. Someone other than the patient then chooses euthanasia on the patients behalf. This would be an instance of nonvoluntary euthanasia.

Q: Involuntary euthanasia is mercy killing at the patients request.

Q: The idea that an individual is dead when all brain functions permanently stop is called the vegetative notion of death.

Q: It is likely that active euthanasia would be used at least occasionally in a hospice guided by act-utilitarianism.

Q: Subjective relativism is the doctrine that a. an action is morally right if one approves of it. b. an action is morally right if ones culture approves of it. c. actions are judged by objective standards. d. an action is morally right even if no one approves of it.

Q: According to the doctrine of double effect, a doctors giving a dying, pain-racked patient a large dose of morphine with the intention of easing her pain (while knowing the act has the side effect of expediting her death) is permissible.

Q: Suppose I think that I sometimes make mistakes on moral matters, and so does my culture. Acknowledging this, I say, My moral beliefs are sometimes wrong and sometimes my cultures moral principles are wrong as well. On which view could my statement be true? a. emotivism c. objectivism b. cultural relativism d. subjective relativism

Q: The view that offenders deserve to be punished, or paid back, for their crimes and to be punished in proportion to the severity of their offenses is known as ________.

Q: A study released in 2014 suggests that an untold number of innocent people have been executed since 1973. Retentionists would reply to these statistics by insisting that this does not show anything intrinsically wrong with capital punishment, but only how it is administered.

Q: When you strictly follow the moral rules passed down to you from others, you are doing ethics.

Q: Underpinning many retributive views of capital punishment is a Kantian emphasis on respect for persons.

Q: An example of moral reasoning is avoiding actions whenever you feel disgusted by them.

Q: Some retentionists contend that if the administration of the death penalty is biased against blacks, then the death penalty itself is unjust, because there is no way to apply the death penalty fairly.

Q: All divisions of ethics concern both values and obligations. These two topics are similar in that they both concern things that we care aboutthings that we can favor or oppose.

Q: ________ is allowing someone to die by NOT doing something (i.e., by withholding or withdrawing measures necessary for sustaining life). a. Passive-active euthanasia c. Nonvoluntary euthanasia b. Passive euthanasia d. Active euthanasia

Q: Those who oppose capital punishment are known as ________.

Q: If money is instrumentally valuable, then having a paying job is also instrumentally valuable.

Q: ________ involves taking a direct action to kill someone (i.e., to carry out a mercy killing). a. Involuntary euthanasia c. Active euthanasia b. Passive euthanasia d. Nonvoluntary euthanasia

Q: ________ are those people who want to continue the policy of capital punishment.

Q: According to the author, if ones religious moral code gives conflicting advice on whether it is permissible to drink alcohol, then moral philosophy cannot provide any guidance because the conflict can only be resolved by interpreting religious texts.

Q: If you believe that there is no moral difference between killing someone and letting someone die, you might reason that a. active and passive euthanasia are not morally equivalent. b. in neither active nor passive euthanasia is the patients death caused. c. in both active and passive euthanasia the patients death is caused, but this has no moral significance. d. in both active and passive euthanasia the patients death is caused, and they are therefore morally equivalent.

Q: Punishment by execution of someone officially judged to have committed a serious crime is called ________.

Q: Nowadays machines can keep an individuals heart and lungs functioning long after the brain permanently and completely shuts down. Thus, we can have an individual whose organs are mechanically operated while he is in a coma or persistent vegetative state. To some, these facts suggest that the a. conventional notion of death is still adequate. b. conventional notion of death is inadequate. c. cessation of breathing and blood flow are not signs of death. d. conventional notion of death has always seemed inadequate.

Q: For many retentionists, the only necessary justification for the type and degree of punishment is what the criminal deserves.

Q: Which of these best describes the purpose of the books discussion of ethics and religion? a. to convince religious believers of the value of doing ethics b. to convince the reader that religious moral codes and theories are unacceptable c. to convince the reader to question everything about morality d. to convince religious believers that ethics is a replacement for religious beliefs

Q: The dominance of moral norms suggests that if a speed limit on a highway conflicts with a persons moral duty to rush a dying man to the hospital, then a. the moral duty would be as weighty as the legal duty. b. neither the legal duty nor the moral duty would apply. c. the moral duty would take precedence over the legal duty. d. the moral duty would sanction any method whatsoever of getting the dying man to the hospital.

Q: At about twenty-three or twenty-four weeks, the state referred to as ________, the fetus may be able to live outside the uterus.