This page explains how to approach ‘relative importance’ questions, which were first introduced in the Ethics exam in 2024. This page is a bit of a rough draft as there isn’t much of a history to go off when it comes to approaching these questions. This is just one method, you might already have one or have been taught one. But having studied the examiner reports and communicated with the ocr subject advisor this is my current best attempt to provide guidance on how to do these questions. Which of course may never be asked about again, but who knows!
Examples from the 2024 ethics exam:
‘The five primary precepts are the most important part of natural law.’ Discuss. [40]
To what extent is Kantian ethics only concerned with duty? [40]
It should be clear from these questions what the unique challenge is. You can’t simply criticise natural law or kantian ethics in the standard way. You could say the primary precepts are outdated, but that doesn’t mean they either are or aren’t the most important part of natural law. So standard criticisms have no straightforwad relevance to such questions.
Topics I think they could ask such questions on, and their components which the question could be focused on:
I am basing this list on the speculation that they could only ask these types of questions about theories/arguments/philosophies which have a considerably detailed representation on the spec – with various elements/parts named. Only in such cases would I expect OCR to set a question asking you to evaluate the relative importance of the parts of a theory. Because only in such cases does the spec require you to have an understanding of particular parts it has.
Plato:
- Understanding of reality
- Reliance on reason
- The (nature of the) forms
- The hierarchy of the forms
- The cave analogy
Aristotle:
- Understanding of reality
- Teleology
- Four causes
- Prime mover
Natural law
- Telos
- Four tiers
- Key precept (synderesis rule)
- Primary precepts
- Secondary precepts
Situation ethics
- Agape
- The six propositions
- The four working principles
- Fletcher’s views on conscience
Kantian ethics
- Duty
- Hypothetical imperative
- Categorical imperative (inc, 3 formulations)
- The three postulates
Utilitarianism
- Utility
- Hedonic calculus
- Act utilitarianism
- Rule utilitarianism
Aquinas’ views on Conscience
- Ratio
- Synderesis
- Conscientia
- Vincible ignorance
- Invincible ignorance
Freud’s views on conscience
- Id
- Ego
- Super-ego
- Psychosexual development
Augustine’s teachings on human nature
- Human relationships pre-fall
- Human relationships post-fall
- Original sin
- Grace
Person of Jesus???
Christian moral action (bonhoeffer)
- Duty to God vs the state (civil disobedience, obedience, leadership and doing God’s will(
- Church as community & spiritual discipline (e.g., confessing church & finkenwalde)
- The cost of discipleship (costly grace, sacrifice & suffering, solidarity)
Ruether
- Gender
- The Christian idea of God
- The maleness of Christ
- Jesus’ challenge to the male-warrier messiah expectation
- God as the female wisdom principle
- Jesus as the incarnation of wisdom
Daly
- Gender
- The christian idea of God
- ‘If God is male then the male is God’
- The unholy trinity
- Spirituality experienced through nature
Liberation theology
- Marx’s teachings on alienation and exploitation
- The use of Marx to analyse capitalism & institutions
- The LT’s views on ‘preferential option for the poor’
- The gospel’s support for solidarity with the poor
- Placing orthopraxis before orthodoxy
Approach to answering these questions
Part 1: AO1 comparisons
The AO1 marks will be for whatever the question is focused on, and on things relevant to helping you to explain that thing. E.g., the primary precepts or Kant’s views on duty. So you have to explain that, ideally first.
The first section of your essay should then involve going through the other AO1 elements of the theory and making comments/arguments about their relative importance to the element which the question has focused on.
Your options when evaluating the relative importance of a component are:
- The component is more important (than the one in the question)
- The component is less important (than the one in the question)
- The component is equally important to the one in the question. Perhaps because:
- they are inter-dependent.
- the theory would equally fail without either of them.
- They are equally important to the overall goal/purpose of the theory.
After your explanation of each other part – it’s good to say why something might be seen as important – even if you then go on to say it’s less important than something else.
This part of the essay might be longer than a typical ‘AO1 chunk’ section.
You will basically have to think on the spot in the exam of what points to say for this – drawing from your understanding of how the theory functions as a whole and the relative importance of its parts to its overall goal. Unless you create some points for each of the elements on the topic list above.
Part 2: Standard evaluation
There is a way to do normal criticisms, but they have to be deployed correctly to be relevant. We can use the impact of the standard criticisms of parts of the theory on the theory itself to tell us about the relative importance of those parts.
You can do standard criticisms of the theory – but they would ideally be criticisms directed at parts of the theory – and ideally at least one of them would be directed at the part of the theory focused on by the question. The significance of the impact of the criticism of that part of the theory then allows you to highlight the relative importance of that part of the theory.
E.g., you could criticise the primary precepts as outdated – if you then explain how that would completely destroy the theory – which then highlights how important the primary precepts were to the theory.
E.g., you could use the clashing duties critique of Kant, to highlight how his theory fails if duty fails – since that highlights how important duty is in kantian ethics.
The formula/algoithm is:
X criticism of Y part of theory has implication Z for the theory – which tells you how important Y is.
“The importance of X in theory Y is demonstrated by the issue of Z”.
One way of doing this really well would be to clearly explain the degree to which the success of the criticism of the part of the theory in question undermines the theory as a whole. That then highlights the relative importance of the part of the theory focused on by the criticism.
E.g., if the theory would completely fail due to the critique of that part, then that shows how important it is.
E.g., if the theory is more severely harmed by critique of a different part, then perhaps that other part is actually more important.
It’s quite complicated to make judgements about which criticisms aim to be more destructive to a theory than others. But you could do that – the more destructive criticisms then highlight more important elements of the theory. E.g., the ‘liberty and rights’ issue for utilitarianism shows the whole concept of consequentialism is morally wrong – which would mean utilitarianism is totally wrong. Whereas the calculation issue just shows that the hedonic calculus is limited in its usefulness, which suggests Act util is not very useful. This suggests the idea of utility & consequentialism is more important. These sorts of judgements are not necessary but could be one way to make these sorts of essays really good. You could just chuck in a bunch of criticisms of the various parts of the theory and say they all are equally destructive and show how equally important all the parts of the theory are. That would be fine. Though if you want the essay to be really impressive you might have to do that really well or do something else interesting.
My current thought is that the standard counters and evaluations might not be too relevant! We are only using these criticisms to show how important a part is to a theory – evaluating whether the criticism actually works isn’t really too relevant.
The most likely/frequent outcome would be that the criticisms of the various elements of the theory would be equally damaging to the theory – which would push for a conclusion about multiple of the theory’s elements being equally important – because the theory would equally fail without them.
Part 3: ‘alternate version’ comparison
This is optional – but you can compare the theory to another version of the same theory (which ideally has different views on the importance of the element focused on by the question) and then do more standard evaluation about which version is right. The version which is right will have a certain importance placed on the element of the theory in the question. Your evaluation of that version being right then is relevant. It shows that level of importance is indeed the level placed by the ‘best/accurate/genuine’ version of the theory.
E.g., proportionalism is a more modern version of natural law.
The other versions place different importance on the components of the theory.
E.g., proportionalism places a different type of importance on the primary precepts, arguing they could be broken in many more situation than Aquinas would have allowed for. It places much more importance on eudaimonia and making the theory more flexible.
The question then becomes whether this different view on relative importance represented by the other version of the theory is correct. I.e., you can then just counter and evaluate the other version of the theory as normal, as in a normal essay.
E.g., John Paul II criticised proportionalism, arguing that Aquinas’ original version of natural law was better (and therefore, he argues that the importance Aquinas placed on the primary precepts was correct, and that proportionalism was wrong to try and change the theory in that regard).
You could use W D Ross as a modern version of deontology that aims to improve on Kantian ethics. Finnis works as a modern version of natural law too. For Util you could use negative utilitarianism, ideal utilitarianism, preference utilitarianism. For situation ethics, some liberationist theologies would argue Fletcher didn’t go far enough and could be argued to be an improved version of situation ethics.
So to summarise:
- AO1 explanation of the element of the theory focusd on by the question
- Meandering through the other elements of the theory while commenting on their relative importance to the element in the question.
- Criticisms of the various elements of the theory aimed at showing how undermined the theory would be by those criticisms and therefore how important those criticised elements are to the theory.