WJEC A2 Religious Studies RS3 ETH

Reaching out to those doing this on Wednesday 11th June. Use this space to talk about it before and after!

Did anyone do the Medical Ethics question? I was fine with the ressucitation of premature babies, which was Part B... but the Part A completely threw me. I was confused by the fact they wanted us to discuss "medical dilemmas", when all I had mainly learnt were non-religious and religious arguments for and against. I think I've managed a B overall, but my structure was a mess. Anyone care to tell me how they answered Part A Medical Ethics?

I decided to do Kant and Virtue, completely threw me off! Never seen questions worded so strangely! Does anyone agree? :|

I did both of them too. They were worded very weirdly but when I came down from my moment of panic I was able to make sense of them! (Or so I hope I did)

What did you do for them? The Deontological part for Virtue threw me off! Also kants was worded so oddly,I just decided to outline the theory!

I had no idea if the Kant question meant that Kant's theory tried to develop ethics without God (which it doesn't, surely, because he postulates that god exists and so these good, dutiful actions will be rewarded in heaven - in fact i read somewhere that his entire theory collapses if God doesn't exist) or whether we were not supposed to make reference to God when writing the answers - you know how sometimes the questions are like "Explain … with reference to …, …." etc, I wondered if this was the same but "without reference to". Anyway the part b on that was horrific (a priori statements) so i just left it and opted for the pacifism and abortion, although I was really prepped to answer Kant… just not that question!

I had exactly the same problem!! but I did Virtue and pacifism in the end, although I was confused because i always thought that virtue ethics was not deontological… I sort of thought that was the whole point about virtue ethics was that there were no duties to perform certain actions. I just said some random stuff about having a duty to develop ourselves into better persons and to always follow the golden mean and stuff! I don't think I did that well in retrospect

Sorry for the late reply! For the deontological aspects of his theory I said we have a goal is to achieve eudomonia (which is teleological) and if we applied the virtues dutifully we would successfully achieve it. So I basically said the virtues are deontological to an extent and they are used to achieve our teleological ending. I have no idea if that's what they were looking for but I assumed it was something like that!

Yeah, Kant was worded really oddly. I went through his theory and related it back to how he avoided religion in each part and how he did so because he thought religion was followed for immoral reasons. So when I mentioned the Categorical Imperative being autonomous and not hypothetical, i would say that religion would be following rules for the sake of God or getting to heaven, and this is immoral because it is not done for duty etc. And then I did the same for each of his principles and how they have no reference to God!

It seems like you did the same as me!! I was so prepared to answer any question, except them ones lol I was thinking it would have thrown a lot of people off, so maybe the grade boundaries will be lowered? (Atleast we can hope)

Virtue Ethics question threw me off but the pacifism one sort of put me at ease!

I did the pacifism question aswell do you remember the question though? I've completely forgot it and now im nervous i put the wrong points in. i put the main points in like jesus and turning the other cheek and ghanddi, the 3 types of pacifism and how they relate to religion and sancity of life stuff. I was also going to do vitrue ethics but the question threw me off and ended up doing abortion/premature babies (which i screwed up)

I did the pacifism question aswell do you remember the question though? I've completely forgot it and now im nervous i put the wrong points in. i put the main points in like jesus and turning the other cheek and ghanddi, the 3 types of pacifism and how they relate to religion and sancity of life stuff. I was also going to do vitrue ethics but the question threw me off and ended up doing abortion/premature babies (which i screwed up)