Update: If you are unsure how to look up a past quiz, see this. If you are still unsure about the design and intention behind the quizzes, see this.
Now that all the quizzes are in, I took a closer look at how the distribution works out. First, the raw distribution, taking all 10 quizzes (most updated version):
Now, taking only the best 9 of each student’s quizzes:
Several questions in Quiz 01 (and beyond) hang upon your ability to notice that you have insufficient information. As the hint also puts it, sometimes, the lack of information is itself information. One question students sometimes ask is how they are supposed to take into account the lack of information, since in principle, there could be many things out there that are unstated, and that could affect the answer. But the point is not for you to take into account what is merely hypothetical and or anything that could have been (even though they are often useful in helping us realize the extent of our ignorance). Let me explain using an example.
Supposed I give you the information that Ah Seng did X, which was happiness neutral for him, but which resulted in an increase of happiness for Ah Lian, and a decrease of happiness for Ah Hwe, where the former (the increase of Ah Lian’s happiness) is larger than the latter (the decrease of Ah Hwe’s happiness).
Now supposed I ask you whether Ah Seng is a Utilitarian. Given the information provided, the correct answer would be that we simply don’t know. To say that Ah Seng is a Utilitarian, what we mean is that he believes that the right thing to do is the one that maximizes the world’s happiness. Do we know that he believes such a thing? The information doesn’t allow us to conclude one way or another.
But now suppose I ask you if a Utilitarian (someone like Dave) would have said that Ah Seng did the morally right thing given just the information provided. Then, the answer is that he did the right thing given the information provided. This will still be true even if it turns out that–unbeknownst to all, Ah Seng’s action actually also caused Ah Beng to be really, really unhappy such that if this additional fact had been taken into account, you will need to change your judgment and say that he did the wrong thing from a Utilitarian perspective. That is, given the information (earlier) provided, Ah Beng did the morally right thing according to Utilitarianism.
Notice that in both cases, you can draw a type of definite conclusion–for the first case, you can draw the conclusion that we don’t know if Ah Seng is a Utilitarian, given the information provided; and in the second case, that he did the right thing from a Utilitarian perspective, given the information provided.
From experience, students sometimes have trouble ‘getting’ the quizzes. The below is about the design of the quiz questions and what we are looking for. Maybe it will help you in preparing and answering the questions, I’m not sure. But hopefully, it will help you avoid some false trails and appreciate where your instructors are coming from.
The quizzes are not meant to be about pure recall. This is partly because the quizzes are take home and thus Open Book (and keep in mind that the Final Exam is open book as well), so in principle, you can always look up the answer for purely content recall questions. But more importantly, it’s because we are more interested in testing for something else.
So what are we testing for? We are ultimately testing for your understanding of concepts and your making careful, precise applications or inferences from them. And these are usually difficult, interesting (hopefully as interesting to you as they have been for us), and intellectual-historically significant concepts in philosophy.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that there is no such thing as a right or wrong answer in philosophy.” Unfortunately, this is actually far from the truth, especially given usual interpretations of what the claim means. For most questions of interest to philosophers, we tend to think that there really is a right or wrong answer. And needless to say, those of us who came to some determinate conclusions about these questions tend to think that we know what the right answers are, or at the very least, have a well grounded opinion about them. And not just because it’s “me” who happened to be holding this or that answer, but because, well, we have thought long hard about the questions and weighted the pros and cons of the differing positions.
If this is so, whence the oft made remark that there is no such thing as a right or wrong answer in philosophy? This is because there are some things that are often true about philosophy and philosophy classes that have been confused with that less cautious statement.
Completely spam free, opt out any time.
This form is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
© 2025 Life, the Universe, and Everything
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
