You may choose your own topic to write your essay on - please make contact with David Hunter prior to the mid-semester break to run your chosen topic by him. Some example topics are below:
O. The ethics of allocating resources to preventive (including "upstream" determinants) versus non-preventative health care
.3. Should participants in research in low-income countries be paid?
Marks. Your essay is worth 50% of your final grade and will be assessed using the Essay Marking Rubric.
Referencing. You may use any academic referencing style, but your referencing must be consistent.
Number of sources. Please see the essay marking rubric which outlines our expectations with respect to the number of sources. To pass, you need to reference at least three sources. To get a high distinction, you need to correctly reference at least 10 sources. The recommended readings for the topic do count toward these. You are encouraged to use the recommended readings but not required to.
Word count. 2500 words +/- 10%. References do not count towards the word count. Footnotes or endnotes, if you use any, do count.
Please see the reference to word count in the essay marking rubric.
Essay structure. Your essay should include the following.
Before writing the final draft of the essay, you should be clear about the answers to the following questions and be confident that your essay will make the answers clear to the marker:
2 What are your reasons for defending it?
3 Are there any arguments against your position?
4 What are the strengths and weaknesses of these arguments?
5 How will you justify your position?
Research. You need to do independent research. You can use the University Library's search function
(http://www.adelaide.edu.au/library), or a reputable online database.
PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed ©›) focusses on health
and medicine, while Philpapers (http://philpapers.org G) focusses on philosophy, including ethics. When searching for literature, it is helpful to check the reference lists of any articles you read, looking for further articles of relevance (this is known as 'pearling'). If you are experiencing problems with your research (e.g. accessing or locating articles), you should ask for help from the University Library.
Help. If you are experiencing any other difficulties (e.g. confusion about some aspect of the topic or uncertainty about how to proceed), feel free to contact me: david.hunter@adelaide.edu.au
Resource. A really good resource on how to write a good ethics or philosophy essays is Jim Pryor's Guidelines on Writing a Philosophy Paper: http://www.jimpryor.net/teaching/guidelines/writing.html E
I also wrote this tongue in check guide to writing a terrible essay/paper in bioethics: https://blogs.bmj.com/medical-
ethics/ 2013/10/07/how-to-write-a-crap-essaypaper-in-bioethics-or-how-to-write-bioethics-to-be-published-in-medical-journals/ G›
I also strongly recommend you engage with the Constructing and Assessing Ethical Arguments Module.
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