Case Study: Joyce Weathers is a 62-year-old patient with emphysema.

Joyce Weathers is a 62-year-old patient with emphysema. Mrs. Weathers is a grandmother who has smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for over 40 years. She enjoys smoking and does not want to quit. Her physician has become somewhat insistent that Mrs. Weathers quit. She tries, but each time she becomes nasty and irritable around her family. She lives with her daughter and two young grandchildren. The family members want her to quit, but it becomes very unpleasant at home when Mrs. Weathers tries to quit.

Discussion Questions

1. Using act-utilitarianism as a model, create a pain-avoided, pleasure-gained list to determine if Mrs. Weathers should continue smoking.

2. If your decision is that she should quit smoking, how can Mrs. Weathers’s family help her?

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.