| Date | Topic | Reading | Presentations | |
| Feb. 3 | Morality and Sex (case) |
Chapter 13 | Jennifer Witer, Chad Linna, Troy Naperala, Loretta Case | |
| Feb. 5 | Abortion (case) |
Chapter 14 | Dan Patin, Paula Sulak, Richard Lewnau, Greg Kunstman | |
| Feb. 7 | Capital Punishment (case) |
Chapter 15 | Stephen Bachhuber, Jason Unger, Shawn Badanjek, Paul Bryant | |
| Feb. 10 | Suicide (case) |
Chapter 16 | Teresa Vassar, Ted Deiss, Mark Anderson, Aaron Veenstra | |
| Feb. 12 | Euthanasia (case) |
Chapter 17 | Christian O'Brian, Jason Piontek, David Glaser, Emily Aldrich | |
| Feb. 14 | Sex Roles and Sexual Equality (case) |
Chapter 19 | Matt Williams, Steve Maynard, Jared Anderson, Timothy Havens | |
| Feb. 17 | Morality and Interpersonal Violence (case) |
Chapter 22 | Talman Wagenmaker, Matt Zander, Valerie Beito, Julie Hoover | |
| Feb. 19 | Morality and the Environment (case) |
Chapter 23 | Tim Kinney, Anthony Meeuwsen, Paul Literski | |
| Feb. 21 | Economic Inequality, Poverty, and Equal Opportunity (case) |
Chapter 18 | Tom Haft, Chris Hooper, Ruth Renken, Robert Rokosky |
| Date | Topic | Reading | Presentations |
| Feb. 3 | Morality and Sex (case) |
Chapter 13 | Blake Adams, Paul Prause, Jason Hiser |
| Feb. 5 | Abortion (case) |
Chapter 14 | LaVie Motley, Ryan Pritchard, Yukari Ito, David Taylor |
| Feb. 7 | Capital Punishment (case) |
Chapter 15 | Rebecca Heltunen, Jermaine Levy, Mike Tercha, Paul Stephens |
| Feb. 10 | Suicide (case) |
Chapter 16 | Mike Taratuta, Genesis Barnes, Anthony Stubbs |
| Feb. 12 | Euthanasia (case) |
Chapter 17 | Anthony Sullins, Bryan Anderson, Pat McCutcheon, Aaron Arvia |
| Feb. 14 | Sex Roles and Sexual Equality (case) |
Chapter 19 | Heidi Ziemann, Nicole Crawford |
| Feb. 17 | Morality and Interpersonal Violence (case) |
Chapter 22 | Amy Zeitler, Angie Vogt, Stephanie Kelley |
| Feb. 19 | Morality and the Environment (case) |
Chapter 23 | Bernard Froman, Geoff Sanders, Kathleen McCutcheon |
| Feb. 21 | Economic Inequality, Poverty, and Equal Opportunity
(case) |
Chapter 18 | Steve Gwinnup, Tim Sandrik |
Doug and Sheila, both age 24, have been romantically and sexually involved with each other for a year and a half. They would like to live together but do not want to commit themselves to a permanent relationship of marriage. Both are very career-oriented professionals, and each wishes to keep open the option of following an attractive job opportunity to a new location--even if this means ending their relationship. Furthermore, neither Doug nor Sheila considers himself/herself to be completely monogamous. Each is willing for the other occasionally to have different sexual partners. They are very careful to practice “safe sex” and to use effective birth control. Doug agrees that, in the unlikely event that Sheila becomes pregnant, he will fully support her in whatever decision she makes about continuing the pregnancy.
Despite her care in using reliable contraceptive methods whenever she has sex, Sheila (See the "Morality and Sex" case) learns that she is 6 weeks pregnant. Since Doug is her sex partner approximately 90% of the time, she believes that Doug is the (potential) father. Doug is not so sure. He cannot understand how Sheila could have gotten pregnant if, as she claimed, she never forgot to take her birth control pill. Sheila reminds him that he had assured her he would support her if she became pregnant, but Doug reminds her that his assurance was only that he would support her decision about whether to continue her pregnancy--not that he would accept himself as the (future) father. Anyway, Doug is not convinced that he is the father, since he is not the only man with whom Sheila has had sex during the past several months. For Sheila, this is not a good time to be pregnant: Her career has just started to take off, and motherhood would compromise her chances of getting ahead in her job. She does not believe that she is ready to be a mother--certainly not a single mother, which she would become if Doug continued to resist accepting the role of husband and father. And putting the child up for adoption after it was born would still mean that she would have to go through the pregnancy and endure the disapprobation of some members of her family as well as some of her friends and associates at work.
(Reported by Tom Kuntz in The New York Times, September 24, 1995.) Paul Jennings Hill is a forty-one-year-old Presbyterian minister. He is also a murderer, condemned to die in Florida's electric chair for the shotgun slayings of an abortion doctor, Dr. John Bayard Britton, and a security escort, James H. Barrett. He shot and killed both men outside a Pensacola, Florida, abortion clinic in July 1995.
On the morning of July 29, 1995, Hill waited outside the abortion clinic. Dr. Britton arrived in a pickup truck with his wife and Mr. Barrett, a seventy-four-year-old retired Air Force officer. Mr. Barrett was driving, Dr. Britton was next to him, and Mrs. Britton was sitting in the jumpseat in back. All were unarmed. Hill opened fire with his new .12-gauge semiautomatic shotgun, bought two days before the killings. He fired three shots at the driver's side of the truck, reloaded, and fired four more shots, killing Mr. Barrett and Dr. Britton. June Barrett was wounded in her left arm but was not killed.
Hill says he believes in the death penalty, but he maintains that it is not justified in his case. He argues that the homicides were justified because he was defending innocent lives. He compares his action to that of police who kill people to prevent other people from being killed. His argument goes more or less as follows: Abortion is the murder of innocent unborn people. God wants us to save the lives of innocent people, and killing guilty abortion doctors (who are comparable to Nazis in Hill's view) is a way of saving innocent lives. Saving innocent lives in accord with God's will is morally right. So killing guilty abortion doctors is morally right. (This case was taken from James E. White, ed., Contemporary Moral Problems5th edition (Minneapolis/St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1997), pp. 264-265.
Dr. Jack Kevorkian is a retired Michigan pathologist who has become (in)famous for assisting suicides. In recent years, he has helped many people commit suicide.
Kevorkian's standard method of assisted suicide is to provide patients with one of several suicide devices he has made. Some inject a lethal drug and others allow the patient to breathe a lethal gas. The lethal drug device allows the patient to push a button or switch forcing a lethal drug (potassium chloride for example) through a tube and into a vein in the arm producing a quick and relatively painless death.
Perhaps the most famous case involved Janet Adkins, a woman suffering from Alzheimer's disease who killed herself by lethal injection using one of Kevorkian's suicide devices. The next day, Kevorkian appeared on practically every talk show and news program in the country. Although Adkins was not terminally ill in the usual sense of the term, a Michigan judge did not prosecute Kevorkian for murder because the state had no laws against assisted suicide. There is a court injunction forbidding Kevorkian to use his devices, but he has continued to use them. (This case was taken from James E. White, ed., Contemporary Moral Problems5th edition, (Minneapolis/St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1997), pp. 223-224.)
Then the U.S. Justice Department intervened in the case. It sued to obtain records from the University Hospital in Stony Brook, New York, to determine if the hospital had violated a federal law that forbids discrimination against the handicapped. Dr. C. Everett Koop, the U.S. surgeon general, appeared on television to express the view that the government has the moral obligation to intercede on behalf of such infants in order to protect their right to life.
Two weeks later, Federal District Judge Leonard Wexler threw out the Justice Department's unusual suit. Wexler found no discrimination. The hospital had been willing to do the surgery but had failed to do so because the parents refused to consent to the surgery....(This case is taken from James E. White, ed., Contemporary Moral Problems 5th edition (Minneapolis/St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1997), p. 224.
The current policy of the air force is that women are not allowed to fly jets in actual combat (although they are allowed to fly combat jets in training). Carol is a qualified woman pilot who demands that she be allowed to fly one of these jets in combat. She has logged many hours of flight time; she holds the rank of major; she is in excellent physical condition; she is unmarried and has no children; and she is a black belt in karate. (This case is adapted from James E. White, ed., Contemporary Moral Problems 5th edition (Minneapolis/St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1997), p. 413.)
Richard lives in an apartment complex. Among his nearby neighbors is a couple, the Sloans, and their 5-year-old son, Luke. Richard does not know the Sloans very well. His contact with them is mainly seeing them coming or going around the apartment building. However, he has noticed that Luke always seems to have bruises on his arms and legs and sometimes has marks on his face and neck that may be the result of his being struck. Whenever Richard encounters Luke without his parents around, he tries to be friendly and to get Luke to talk to him. When Richard asks Luke where he got the bruises and marks, Luke says that he "fell down" but provides no details. He always ends the conversation as soon as possible by saying that he has to go home.
Farmers and cattle ranchers in Brazil are burning the rain forests of the Amazon River to clear the land for crops and livestock. According to an article in Time magazine (September 18, 1989), an estimated 12,350 square miles have been destroyed so far, and the burning continues. conservationists and leaders of rich inductrial nations have asked Brazil to stop the destruction. They claim that if the Amazon rain forests are destroyed, more than one million species will vanish. This would be a significant loss of the earth's genetic and biological heritage. Furthermore, they are worried about changes in the climate. The Amazon system of forests plays an important role in the way the sun's heat is distributed around the earth because it stores more then seventy-five billion tons of carbon in its trees. Burning the trees of the Amazon forests will produce a dramatic increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Many scientists believe that the trapping of heat by this atmospheric carbon dioxide--the greenhouse effect--will significantly increase the global warming trend.
Brazilians reply that they have a sovereign right to use their land as they see fit. They complain that the rich industrial nations are just trying to maintain their economic supremacy. Brazilian President Jose Sarney argues that the burning is necessary for Brazilian economic development, particularly when Brazil is struggling under an $111 billion foreign debt load. (This case is adapted from James E. White, ed., Contemporary Moral Problems 5th edition (Minneapolis/St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1997), p. 524)
(Reported by Timothy Egan in The New York Times, October 29, 1995.) With a net worth of $6.5 billion, Paul G. Allen is one of the richest men in the world. How did he make so much money? In 1975 he started Microsoft with his grade-school friend Bill Gates. Microsoft is now the world's largest software company and has been very profitable. Allen's critics say that Bill Gates is responsible for the success of the company, and not Allen. These critics complain that Allen's vast fortune is a fluke, and result of hitching up with the superstar Bill Gates. Allen left Microsoft in 1983 after a cancer scare. He was diagnosed as having Hodgkin's disease, but radiation therapy cured him. Since 1983 Allen has invested in various computer companies such as Medio and Skypix but has not been very successful. Meanwhile the value of his Microsoft stock (he owns 55.7-million shares) just keeps going up.
Allen lives alone on a six-acre waterfront compound in Mercer Island, an exclusive enclave for the very wealthy near Seattle. Allen's compound has a twenty-seat theater, video screens in most rooms, a swimming pool, a waterfall, and, most impressive of all, a skylit, regulation-size basketball court. Allen is the owner of the Trailblazers, a professional basketball team, and sometimes he has private games for his entertainment between his own team and the Seattle Supersonics. When bored with basketball, he can use his private jet to go to tropical islands or sail on his 150-foot yacht. He is also interested in the late Jimi Hendrix (a Seattle native), and he has spent $60 million for a Jimi Hendrix Museum to be called the Experience Music Project (named after the Hendrix sex-and-drug song "Are You Experienced?"). He paid $50,000 for a broken Stratocaster once played by Hendrix and has acquired 10,000 more Hendrix artifacts to be displayed in the museum. Allen plays the guitar himself in a rock band called the Threads and can play "Purple Haze," a famous Hendrix number.
Allen has given away money for a library to be named after his father and for a park in downtown Seattle, but so far he has shown no interest in giving money to the needy....(This case is adapted from James E. White, ed., Contemporary Moral Problems 5th edition (Minneapolis/St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1997), p. 346.)