One of the cool things about the 75-minute presentation/discussion assignment in Ethics is that you get to write the web discussion questions for the week. Then the assigned respondant(s) write a 750-word essay answering one of them. (My Aristotle on the Place of Emotion in Argument and Levinas and the Commons posts were written under these assignment parameters.)

I ended up shortening my original reading list in order to get the pagecount right. We read Bollier's Why We Must Talk About the Information Commons, "The Gift Community" from Hyde's The Gift, and What Utilitarianism Is by John Stuart Mill. Here are the questions I offered to the class:

1. Apply the categorical imperative (using the Humanity formulation) to the problem of responsibility to the academic commons.
2. Apply the basic precepts of happiness in Mill's Utilitarianism to the academic commons.
3. Compare Levinas' conception of responsibility with that put forth by Mill.
4. It can be argued that Levinas would say using another's ideas for one's own purposes is not sufficiently honoring the Other's alterity*. Extend this argument to its logical conclusion.
5. Anarchism has been closely related to 'copyfight' movements (i.e., groups who agitate against current intellectual property legislation.) It has been applied both metaphorically (through the notions of piracy and sharing) and literally (through moral arguments against owning intellectual property). Hyde and other gift theorists also often align themselves with it. Does alignment with anarchism constitute an effective rhetorical strategy for copyfighters? Why or why not?
6. Buber suggests that our ethical responsibility lies in the true, open exchange between two individuals. Is this idea applicable to exchanges within a commons? Is it applicable to gift theory in general?

*This one is drawn from my Ethics professor's response to my short essay on Levinas and the Commons.