Blog #8

Lying.  Is lying a good or moral thing to do?  I think this topic is very hard to make a call on.  In life we are all put into situations that we may need to lie, it’s not always a “bad” lie but nonetheless it is a lie.  Group 7 talked about a lie that they thought was wrong and one that was ok.  The first was one about lying to your friends about your ugly girlfriend, I think this is a terrible reason to lie.  Honestly if you have to lie to your friends about your girlfriend then you either need to find new friends or a new girl.  This lie is not helping anyone at all if anything its hurting people yea you dodged a bullet from your friends but you mostly likely wont be happy because one you lied to your friends and two you have an ugly girlfriend that you are embarrassed of.  Then the group gave an example of lying to a dying grandma who is fighting a battle with cancer.  Even though you know that the cancer will take her life you tell her everything is gunna be fine and you will make it through this.  To me this lie doesn’t seem as bad because you are giving someone hope that they will win this battle, granted it is false hope but they don’t know that.  This just doesn’t seem as bad because you are helping someone else cope with a terrible thing, you are not just benefiting yourself by lying about your ugly girlfriend.

Blog #7

Is utilitarianism to demanding on the people?  It is hard to make a judgement on this because it is so open ended.  How can you hold someone responsible for something they really have no obligation to.  The group in class used an example from Seinfeld to explain Mill’s point.  The example was about Jerry and his friends where in the streets and watched a man getting mugged and they didn’t help him so they got arrested for not stopping it.  When they were being tried they didn’t understand why they had been arrested and the court told them they had an obligation to help that person.  Were they really responsible?  I think yes and no.  They were because when someone is in distress I think you should try and help them.  But at the same time I say no they are not because by helping that person they are putting themselves at harm.  They are just your average citizens if they had been cops then they definatly would have a moral obligation to help that person because that is their job even if it puts them in harms way.

Blog #6

In the passage we are looking at the objector rose the point that “utilitarianism renders men cold and unsympathising.”  They back this up by say that when a person commits an act in order to judge how moral the act was you must look at how the overall happiness is effected.  You don’t take into consideration the persons reasons for committing the acts nor do you take into consideration what type of person committed the act.  So this is why the objector says that “utilitarianism renders men cold and unsympathising”.  For example if Mother Teresa and Hitler both back handed a kid which one would be worse.  Well according to utilitarianism you would have to weigh out the effects on total happiness and then decide whether the act was moral or not.  But according to the objector you would not only have to take into consideration the act itself but the reasons for committing the acts and the type of person that committed the act.  So it would seem that since Mother Teresa was a “better” person to most, her back handing a kid would be less morally bad than Hitler back handing a kid.  Hitler’s act would definitely be seen as terrible act while for Mother Teresa it would be seen as bad but not as bad as Hitler. 

Blog #5

Are the higher pleasures really superior to the lower pleasures?  At first it may seem like they are because they are higher pleasures so obviously they seem better than the lower pleasures, but that may not be true.  The higher pleasures are not necessarily true.  If you have gone all of your life and all you have know is the lower pleasures then to you there may not be anything better than that.  You are perfectly happy living your life day to day sitting on your couch playing video games, eating junk food, and not going to school.  That may make you perfectly happy because to that person they are living the life.  They don’t have to worry about anything they are perfectly content with living in their parents basement and working at the local gas station for the rest of their lives.  That is their idea of higher pleasures to them the lower pleasures would be something like going outside playing and interacting with others, or not having video games.  But on the other hand this life style is just not good enough for some.  This group has experienced the higher pleasures in life such as love, friendship, and the feeling of accomplishment.  To these people once they have experienced these things there is nothing better and they will do anything humanly possible to make sure they still experience these desirable higher pleasures.  So to these people yes the high pleasures are way better than the lower ones, but to a person who has never experienced these higher pleasures there is no problem with the lower pleasures because it is all they have ever known.  So the desireableness of pleasures all depends on the individual, so the higher pleasures are not always better.

Blog #4

We can only be judged on what we do directly once it is out of our hands and goes into another’s hands we are no longer responsible.  In class we used the example of Boone donating money to a charity, he did all the research and thought his money was going to help people but little did he know he was donating money to a person that was gunna take that money and use it to kill people.  So from the donation ten people died.  This is no longer Boone’s moral responsibility.  He had his heart in the right place, he was donating money to a charity that he researched and he thought that it was going to benefit kids.  He had no way of knowing that the money he donated was going to be used to kill people.  It is no longer morally responsible because it changed hands, another person stepped in and turned something that was supposed to be good into a terrible thing.  There was no way he knew that this was going to happen, on the other hand if he knew that the money he was donating was going to be used to kill people then yes he would be morally responsible because he knew what the outcome of his actions would be.

Utilitarianism is the idea that your action is good in so far as it increases happiness in a way that you can reasonably predict.  So in Boone’s case he fits this theory because there was no way that he could reasonably predict that his donation would be used for evil.  He did the research and thought his donation would help people not hurt people.

Blog #3

According to the DCT god can not have reasons for his decision.  He just kind of makes decisions because that’s just what he does.  So according to this another problem is raised, If god just makes decisions based on nothing then is there a reason to praise him for what he is doing even he has no reasons for making the decisions he has.  From this I lean away from the DCT being true, because if god just made decisions without reason he would be irrational.  So going back to the example from class Becca said she is taking Ethics 14 because she needed it for a requirement.  If she had said no reason and really meant that she had absolutly no reason for taking this class she would be considered irrational or crazy.  Is god irrational or is there actually a reason behind his decisions?  I think there is definitely a reason or reasons behind the decisions god has made.  So yes I think we should praise god for being moral because he is rational and there are reasons for the decisions he has made.

Blog #2

The Divine Command Theory (DCT) is a theory which states that good things are good because god said so.  For instance the ten commandments were given from god to tell people how they should live their lives in order to be “good” or not a sinner.  If this theory was false all religion would fall apart.  We base our beliefs on these rules and commands and if they were proven to be false then what would we go by?  We would have nothing to go by except what we think is good, rather then what we know is good.  Granted there would still be some structure since so many people had been going by this system for so long.  Like we disgusted in class if a person woke up one day and said last night in their sleep god talked to them and said it is good to eat babies and kill people for no reason at all, I highly doubt people will just start running around eating babies and killing people for fun.  But over time new problems and issues would arise and if the DCT was proven to be wrong there would be no way to solve this new dilemmas because the theory was wrong people would be left asking, so now what do we do?  Then we would have many people having many different solutions for problems and nothing to base their decisions on because everything in the past was wrong.

Blog #1

In history there have been many cultural disagreements, where cultures clashed and one thought that they were superior to the other.  Besides the enslavement of the African Americans one of the other big cultural clashes in history revolved around Hitler’s killing of the Jews.  Adolf Hitler saw the Jews as a lesser race and because of this he wanted to rid them from the world so he rounded them all up and sent the to camps where mass killings of these people took place.  To a cultural relativist this would be find be they would believe that every culture has its own moral codes and its own beliefs which are neither correct or incorrect.  So any other culture who thinks this is wrong is actually wrong because it was their culture to say the the Jews were a lesser person than everyone else.  Hitler’s views were definatly an arguement against the views of a cultural relativist, It doesn’t take a genius to say that this is obviously wrong and that is were people stepped in and tried to take Hitler out of power to stop the slaughter he has committing.

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