Objective 12-1
Recognize the special nature of moral reasoning.

• Know that moral reasoning concerns itself with subjective value judgments.
• Define value judgments.
• Be able to distinguish moral from nonmoral issues.
• Grasp the concept of "consistency" in moral reasoning.
• Give examples that show the distinction between committing an inconsistency ad hominem fallacy and accusing someone of being inconsistent (not a fallacy).
• Differentiate sharply between nonsubjective claims and value judgments and see how they work together in moral reasoning.

Objective 12-2
Be familiar with the characteristics of moral principles.

• Know the major philosophical perspectives on what moral reasoning is and why it works.
• Understand how to derive specific moral value judgments from a factual premise (that is not a value judgment) plus a premise containing a general moral principle without committing the Naturalistic Fallacy.
• Be able to define moral relativism and subjectivism and differentiate both of them from the anthropological fact of cultural pluralism.
• Distinguish between ethical egoism and ethical altruism
• Learn the definition and the basic argumentative strategy of the consequentialist theory utilitarianism.
• Know what the nonconsequentialist theory, deontology, is and how Kantian duty theory analyzes moral obligation.
• Be able to distinguish between religious relativism and religious absolutism.
• Understand what virtue theory is and the crucial points at which it deviates from other moral theories.

Objective 12-3
Understand that moral deliberation assumes a grounding, or support, from a mixture of perspectives.

Objective 12-4
Know what makes legal reasoning resemble moral reasoning but also which characteristics are unique to each one.

• Understand the special nature of legal principles and how they compare to moral principles.
• Recognize that legal reasoning involves applying general principles to specific cases and always refers to basic perspectives within which that reasoning takes place.
• Know the meanings of the four kinds of grounds one might give for justifying a law: legal moralism, the harm principle, legal paternalism, and the offense principle.
• Recognize the special role that appeals to precedent play in legal reasoning: be able to explain stare decisis .

Objective 12-5
Become familiar with the defining characteristics of aesthetic reasoning and the methods unique to arguments in aesthetics.

• Learn the eight aesthetic principles most often adduced in discussions of art.
• Realize that sometimes more than one of these eight principles might be at work in a single argument, but that while these principles might be consistent with one another it is also possible for them to conflict.
• Be sensitive to the controversies over what aesthetic arguments mean, controversies parallel in some ways to those concerning moral reasoning but divergent from them in other ways.