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Strategies for Answering Discussion and Essay Questions

Chapter 3

III: Strategies for selected Discussion and Questions in Chapter 3 (See page 98-99 in the

textbook)

A. Strategies for Selected Discussion Questions in Chapter3

3. Construct the best arguments you can to advance the positions that have been held on both

sides of the Napster dispute. Next compare the strength of your argument for why the sharing

of on-line proprietary music files should be allowed to the strength of your argument for why

it should not. Is either argument sound? If not, is either argument deductive (but with one or

more false premises)? Is either inductive? Is either, or are both, arguments fallacious? You

may also want to consult Appendix G (available on this Web site) to go over the guidelines

for determining how to verify the truth and falsity of statements that make up arguments.

4. In constructing this argument, you may want to look ahead to some of the sample

arguments included in Chapter 5, on privacy in cyberspace. Once you construct the best

argument you can for why personal privacy should be strongly protected in all e-commerce

activities, test your arguments against the standards for validity and invalidity that we

examined in Chapter 3. Also determine whether your argument contains any informal logical

fallacies by reviewing the list of common fallacies that we examined in Sec. 3.9.

B. Strategies for Selected Essay Questions in Chapter3

1. One could construct the following kind of argument for why students should be required to

take a course in cyberethics.

Premise 1. Undergraduate student should be required to take courses on topics that

examine ethical and social issues that will impact them in their professional and

personal lives.

Premise 2. Cyberethics courses examine ethical and social issues that impact students

in both their professional and personal lives.

Conclusion. Undergraduate students should take a course in cyberethics

This argument is valid or deductive because if the premises are both true, the conclusion must

also be true. However, we don’t yet know whether the premises are, in fact, true. Premise 1 is

somewhat controversial in that the truth of that statement can be challenged. So the argument

is not sound. If we modified Premise 1 slightly to read, “Generally, students should be

required…”, the argument would be invalid (instead of deductive), because it would then be

possible for one or more premises to be true and the conclusion false. However, because the

conclusion would likely be true when the premises are true, this argument would also be

inductive. And since it premises would be true in the actual world, this particular inductive

argument would be stronger overall than it was in its deductive form.

2. A good starting point in this case would be to locate a copy of either Time or Newsweek

magazine. Each periodical has columns on technology issues, and each has run cover stories

on Napster, Internet pornography, Internet pedophilia, etc. Once you have located a periodical

that contains an article that addresses a particular ethical or social involving cybertechnology,

isolate one or more arguments made by the author(s). Next, test each argument via the seven-

step strategy we used in Chapter 3 (pages 90-91 to determine whether each argument is

deductive, inductive, or fallacious.