Your job in this essay is to defend one of the authors against an objection that might be raised against them. You are assigned to defend Mengzi’s view that human nature is good against the objection that the men of Police Battalion 101 did not appear to be able to see that what they were doing was morally wrong. First: In the first paragraph, summarize the view you have been assigned to defend.
Second: In the second paragraph, articulate the stated objection to your author as sympathetically and
effectively as you can.
Those first two paragraphs together should constitute no more than one–half the length of your paper.
Third: Respond to that objection as sympathetically and effectively as you can on behalf of your assigned author. Spend at least 250 words on this.
You are not required to make novel arguments in defense of your assigned author, though you are welcome to do so. By the time the assignment is due, these objections and potential responses will all have been touched upon in class in various ways, and you are welcome to start with the ideas brought up in class if you wish. However, to make your response compelling, you will have to add a bit of structure or richness of your own to it. You will be graded on how accurately you portray your assigned author’s view, how effectively you raise the assigned objection, and how clearly and cogently you defend your author against the assigned objection. For the third part of this assignment, simply recapitulating the author’s view in different words is not satisfactory: Think specifically about how the author might effectively deal with the specific objection raised. Although our primary aim is not to grade for grammar and spelling, essays with poor grammar and spelling will be marked down.
Use of Sources:
You are welcome to cite the course readings using any clear and consistent format you wish (for example Xunzi, p. 252). You may also cite outside sources if you wish. If you do the latter, clearly provide all bibliographic information, including the URL if it is an internet source. If you are using a string of exact wording from a source, put those words in quotation marks. Your paper should not include more than 20 quoted words in total. (Please read the picture slides attached before organizing the essay, try arguing that because the soldiers were visibly sad sometimes and had to be intoxicated throughout a lot of their time, that would mean that they did not by nature enjoy being bad.)