In this class, we learned about the branch of philosophy, ethics, that is concerned with answering questions related to morality. One of the major skills that we used throughout the course was extracting a concise argument from an article or discussion and using logic to determine the argument’s soundness (truth + validity). In class, we practiced this skill using lots of common and sometimes silly examples but we were also able to examine issues that typically cause a lot of discourse and applied the “extracto-technique.” I believe that this is an extremely useful tool to have outside of the classroom. We live in a world where emotionally charged discussion can be un-doing for so many. However, it is vital to be able to take in information and determine whether the argument you hear  is true and valid

Throughout the semester, we wrote several papers that utilized the extracto-technique in articles of our choosing. In Russ Shafer-Landau’s The Fundamentals of Ethics, he outlines the steps of this technique very clearly. Identify an argument and all of an argument’s premises and imagine that each premise is true. Then ask yourself: if I accept that all of the premises are true, could that lead to the conclusion being false? If so, the argument is invalid. Each premise of the argument has to be valid and true in order to be considered sound. I demonstrated this technique along with further analysis of an argument in the paper below.