Below you will find help with selected exercises from the book.

12-4, 2
12-6, 3
12-12, 4

12-4, 2.
When Sarah bought the lawn mower from Jean, she promised to pay another fifty dollars on the first of the month. Since it is now the first, Sarah should pay Jean the money.

People ought to keep their promises. This is a good point at which to observe something about value-judgment premises. You don't want to make them either too narrow or too broad. In this example, an excessively narrow premise would say, "People ought to keep their promises about paying for lawn mowers"; true enough, but not a general principle we carry around with us, and hence not a justification we can reach for in moral argumentation. An excessively broad premise would say, "People ought to do whatever they say they will." Such premises have the advantage of more clearly prescribing one course of action rather than another, but the disadvantage of being less likely to be true.

12-6, 3. Criticize affirmative action from a Kantian perspective.

As the hint suggests, the Kantian test to use here is the treatment of people only as means to an end, rather than also as ends in themselves. The critic of affirmative action can say that it denies some people's equal opportunity to get a job in the interests of promoting the social good of racial or gender equality; since that is an end to which we sacrifice the individual autonomy of some, it fails the test.

Note a couple of things. First, duty theory runs into the most trouble when two people's rights conflict with each other. A case like this one pits fairness toward one applicant against fairness toward another (since the point of affirmative action is to make sure that no one loses a job because of discrimination). When one of them will be treated merely as a means no matter what, we have no further test that will tell us what to do.

Second, you could work out a Kantian defense of affirmative action, depending on how you conceive that program. If affirmative action is designed to equalize opportunity, the emphasis on women and minority job candidates works against a built-in bias against them. Then the point is not to hire more women or minority candidates, but to give them the same chance everyone else has.

12-12, 4.

1. Laurence Olivier's film production of Hamlet has merit because he allows us to experience the impact of the incestuous love that a son can feel for his mother.
2. Nevertheless, Olivier's Hamlet is flawed because it introduces a dimension inconceivable to an Elizabethan playwright.

(a) relies on principle 5, which you can arrive at as follows: The phrase "allows us to experience" shows that the audience's psychological reaction is the crucial element, so we choose from 4, 5, and 6. We eliminate principle 4 on the grounds that the impact of incestuous love is not a source of pleasure in healthy audiences; we eliminate principle 6 because "special nonemotional experiences" does not capture what (a) is saying.

(b) relies on principle 2, as the phrase "Elizabethan playwright" gives away. Only principle 2 clearly refers to what the artist feels or believes.

As for compatibility, the two principles may both be true. Indeed, they have very little to do with each other (and therefore have few chances to contradict each other). Principle 5 bases aesthetic judgment only on what happens to the audience, whereas principle 2 looks away from the audience to the artist alone. For this reason, the principles don't bump up against each other.