Jen asked:

I am really stuck on "Moral truths exist independently of us." — I get this bit about Plato etc. It's the
next bit that gets me since we haven't really go many notes on it:

"Discuss using examples and illustrate your view."

What does it want me to do?

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Think. That's what it wants you to do. The question asks for examples. Think whether there has been
any time in your life, or anything that has come within your experience, that raised the question
whether right-and-wrong is something real, independent of the moral attitudes of this or that person,
or group of people. That would be an example which illustrated the question 'whether moral truths
exist independently of us'.

It won't be in your notes, because your teacher hasn't lived your life, hasn't experienced the things
that you've experienced.

Let me give just two examples, to start you off.

On this page, there is a discussion of abortion. Those people who are against a law allowing abortion
in cases where a pregnancy is unwanted are passionately against it, and think that abortion is a great
evil. Those people who are in favour of 'a woman's right to choose' believe just as strongly that it is
the anti-abortionists who are in the wrong. Is there an right answer to this question, in reality? How
would we know? And how can we discover what that 'right answer' is?

Here's another example, which might seem to point in a different direction. Not so very long ago,
slavery was thought to be morally acceptable. Nowadays, most of the people you are likely to meet
would say that slavery is morally unacceptable. How did this change of view come about? Is it just an
example of different groups of people holding different views? Or is it a case of something that really
iswrong, although people at first did not accept that it was wrong, and only later came to see the
error of their ways?

Over to you.

Geoffrey Klempner