Instructions

The paper (6–8 pages long) is due, as an attachment, via the “Assignments” tool on Canvas by midnight Wednesday, March 17, in MSWord format or in a format easily convertible to MSWord (e.g., Open Oﬃce, plain text, or RTF).

The topics listed here are suggestions. If you want to write on another topic, feel free to do so. It might be a good idea, however, in that case, to check with me ﬁrst.

Note that the topics tend to have many sub-questions. You need not (and probably should not) try to answer all of them. (You certainly should not just answer them one after another in order — that would make a bad paper.) I put them there to suggest various directions for thinking about the topic, and in particular to head oﬀ superﬁcial or excessively simple ways of thinking about it.

All of the topics below require you to make substantial use of material from at least two of our authors (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, and Hume). You can write about more than two if you feel it improves your paper (but you will not get extra credit just for including a third author). If you want to write about a topic which involves only one author, you should check with me.

You can also use other outside material if you think it helps your paper (though, again, I don’t necessarily recommend that). If so you must of course make it clear exactly what you are using and how. Also, it should still be clear that the paper was written for this course.

If you have any questions about what plagiarism is or how to avoid it, you can ask me, or consult the resources listed on the Library website.[1]https://guides.library.ucsc.edu/citesources/plagiarism. For possible consequences of plagiarism, see the Academic Misconduct Policy.[2]https://www.ue.ucsc.edu/academic_misconduct.

The intent of the paper is to discuss the views or attitudes manifested in the reading, rather than your own opinions on the topic. That is: you should ideally come up with something interesting and original to say (not mere summary), but it should something interesting and original about what our authors mean. (In particular: I don’t expect or encourage you to reach a judgment about whether what they say is correct or not.) If you are upset by something one of our authors says, or ﬁnd it ridiculous, you should use that as an excuse to try and understand better why someone would say such a thing. If you can’t manage that, you should try to write about a topic which doesn’t touch on the problem area.

For a good comparison paper, remember that the comparison should be interesting. This means, for example, that the paper should not read like two shorter papers (one on each author) stuck together. Also it should say something non-obvious about their similarities and diﬀerences. (It is always possible to make any two positions sounds similar if one is vague enough. But that isn’t interesting.)

If you’re using the editions I ordered, you can refer to the readings just by giving the page number. If you use a diﬀerent edition and/or some other source, please give at least enough bibliographical information that I can ﬁnd it if necessary. There’s no need for a separate bibliography or title page.

You can ﬁnd answers to some commonly asked questions about my assignments and grading in my FAQ.

This document, and all other instructor-generated material in this course, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.