OCR A2 Religious Studies - Thursday 6th June 2013

Basically, have my chances of the A* disappeared?

I don't think so, its really hard to say. It largely depends on the examiner you get, how you wrote the essay, how good your arguments were. A* is not impossible, many people are unsure about exactly what that FW/D question demanded so it is likely the examiner won't knock of marks just because the same arguments were in a different format to what they expected.

That's reassuring, thank you! How about the meta-ethics question, do you think it would have been necessary to refer to all four theories? It was either talk about emotivism in more detail, or mention precriptivism briefly, I went with the former.

What questions did you answer?

Does this sound okay...? For the free will and determinism question I talked about hard determinism and soft determinism and how this meant we had to have freedom to have moral choice. But then I argued that for soft determinisms we need a level of determinism otherwise events would be random. Therefore without freedom it isn't impossible to have moral choice because we need to be determined to have choice. I used Hume to support this.

For meta-ethics I said that there were two approaches to the view that the word good has no meaning, cognitive and non-cognitive. I then talked about Ethical naturalism, intuitionism and emotivism and talked about the strengths and weaknesses of these views. I then concluded that emotivism doesn't really relate to how we think about morality (in that we believe some things are objectively wrong.) I can't remember who I said was most successful though haha.

This is basically what I said! Although I was such a numpty and forgot naturalism :'(


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Someone PLEASE tell me if i completely screwed up the meta-ethics question relating to the word 'good' - i tried to bring in synoptic links. And i basically argued in two short paragraphs that the term had significant meaning as it provided the basis of bentham's utilitarianism (hedonic calculus - greatest good for greatest number) and was a central feature in kant's summum bonum????


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Phil was Boethius and Symbols
Ethics free will and meta-ethics

Not at all necessary - I wrote about emotivism, intuitionism, ethical naturalism and logical positivism + Wittgenstein. I briefly mentioned prescriptivism as an extension of emotivism but like you say, briefly. It isn't at all necessary to discuss all 4, you're credited on what you write, how much you know about the topics you present and how well you can sustain a balanced argument and make a final, reasoned judgement

Yay, even the determinism stuff because I was worried about what I said about soft determinism... I don't think that will count against you at all. It asked us to critically assess the view that good basically has no meaning or whatever so if more to do with emotivism. It's better to not include something rather than include it but do nothing with it (if that makes sense...)

Does this sound okay...? For the free will and determinism question I talked about hard determinism and soft determinism and how this meant we had to have freedom to have moral choice. But then I argued that for soft determinisms we need a level of determinism otherwise events would be random. Therefore without freedom it isn't impossible to have moral choice because we need to be determined to have choice. I used Hume to support this.

For meta-ethics I said that there were two approaches to the view that the word good has no meaning, cognitive and non-cognitive. I then talked about Ethical naturalism, intuitionism and emotivism and talked about the strengths and weaknesses of these views. I then concluded that emotivism doesn't really relate to how we think about morality (in that we believe some things are objectively wrong.) I can't remember who I said was most successful though haha.

You could have also mentioned Kant in the Soft Determinism part of the first question. As he says that freedom is needed to preserve personal autonomy.

I did! I didn't bother to put that bit a minute ago because he's a bit of weird soft determinist isn't he? Free will in the noumenal realm and all that. So Kant linked them both together I think... Can't remember any more haha.

In relation to your free will question did you argue for libertarians too as they believe we are completely free so make moral choices? Just curious

Guys i thought the exam was pretty good, i mean the questions were pretty much what i was expecting.
I did
ontological argument
For 18mark i mentioned :
Anselms a priori approach
Anselms reply to gaunilo about necessity of god
Descarte
Plantinga
Malcom
William lane craig
And lastly wittgenstein
For Ao2 :
G.e more, kant,hume, gaunilo

Religious language
I mentioned why it was meaningless
Logical positivists
Verification principle
Aj ayers development
Anthony flews falsification
And wittgensteins language game

For ao2 i argued why some would argue its not meaningless by saying
The problem with verfication principle itself,
R. M hares blik argument
John hicks eschological verification
Mitchells argument against flew and i dont rmmbr what else lol


Meta ethics/Ethical language
For this i mentioned problems that show ethical language is meaningless, started with humes fork, is-ought gap, developed it using Moore, den explained Moores defination of good problem, then moved to naturalistic fallacy and open question theory.
I then lastly mentioned emotivist aj ayer as to show that ethical langauge was meaningless

For ao2:
I started by giving arguments on whether these problems wrre solved or not, started by intuituonists solution and assessed how convincing it was, mentioned naturalist position and stevenson, but i ran out of time to do more


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Ontological?
What paper was this O.o?

It was philosophy of religion and ethics, didnt you guys have that paper?


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- Im sure everyone did better than they thought and this paper was pretty narrow/specific and hard so its possible the grade boundaries would go really down

- Also in AS if a person gets 90ums and over in both papers how much would you need in A2 to get an A* OR A overall

Someone please answer this question !!

Thank you !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!