Page 1 of 2 CAPSTONE ESSAY ASSIGNMENT INSTRUCTIONS OVERVIEW This assignment is an essay that brings all of the knowledge and skills developed in this course to bear on a single ethical issue. You will write an 1800-2000-word essay (not including footnotes, the title page, table of contents, and bibliography) that combines the insights and arguments of the second and third discussions into a single carefully-articulated work. Format should be 12pt, Times New Roman font and in Turabian format. INSTRUCTIONS Begin your paper with a brief introductory paragraph that clearly states your goals, thesis, and method. State what metaethical theory you are defending, the issue in applied ethics you are addressing, the conclusion(s) you want to defend. Next, provide a lengthy and detailed defense of the metaethical theory you defended in Discussion: Compare and Contrast Metaethical Theories. This will likely reflect what you argued for in your thread and the feedback that you received from the professor and/or classmates who responded to your thread. Here you can go into much more detail than you could in the discussion, which was limited to 600 words. If you have changed your mind since Discussion: Compare and Contrast Metaethical Theories and wish to defend a different theory, you may do so. This section of the Capstone Essay Assignment would be roughly half of your paper (three to four pages). Next, proceed to the applied ethics issue that you discussed in your Discussion: Ethical Application thread. Here you should greatly expand upon your argument. Add detail, nuance, and argumentation, providing a fairly complete and comprehensive application based on the theory you defend in the first half of the paper. You may illustrate the application with real-life examples, but please do not fill your paper with anecdotes. You should anticipate possible objections to your approach to the issue and respond to them in an objective and informed manner. (For ideas on how others might object to your approach, a good place to begin would be your classmate's reply to your thread, but you need not stop there. Many books and articles have been published on issues in applied ethics, and these can provide a wealth of possible arguments relevant to every issue.) You are encouraged to use quotes from sources as a way to support your arguments, but quotes should not make up more than one and a half pages of your essay. Your conclusion should reflect what you have argued in your thesis. It should recap what you have accomplished and how you have accomplished it. This paper is not required to utilize any sources outside of those that were used in the class (the two textbooks, the videos, and the PointCast presentations), but use of additional resources is permitted and encouraged. At the minimum the paper should utilize the resources from the class. All resources used must be listed in the bibliography and any resources quoted, paraphrased, or alluded to must be documented via footnotes formatted according to Turabian. Sources such as Wikipedia and online dictionaries do not count as academic sources and should not be used. Biblical references are encouraged, but will not count as an academic source.