nessuh’s Weblog

Children should not be responsible for knowing the social contract because wisdom comes with age. They dont know at birth what is right and what is wrong. But people should be required to abide by the rules and what they are supposed to do. They have to go by whatever the rules are in place where they live until they move somewhere else where the rules are different they have to follow the ones they are forced to.

Rationality and self-love, according to Kant, are connected in the sene that humans have the ability to reason. This ability allows humans to act in accordance to our beliefs on what is moral and what is immoral. In Kant’s view, morality should follow the concept of categorical imperative. He connects rationality and morality and says that any action going against this is immoral. Morality is solely based on the ability to reason and our actions that follow and not based on what the individual desires.

According to Kant, only act in accordance to your maxim. Your maxim would only be moral if it could become a universal law. Lets say if cheating on exams were made into a universal law. So everyone is cheating on their exams now and its ok. But then the professor thinks, Wait a second, what is the point of giving out an exam if everyone is just going to cheat? No one actually knows the information so the professor isnt really testing the students, he/she is simply giving them an assignment. The professor stops giving out exams and now there cannot be a universal law to cheat on exams because there are no exams in the first place.

Happiness most definitley does have an intrinsic value. Many different actions or things can happen that can make a person happy but the value of happiness is so much greater than it is not dependent on external factors. Being happy has a much greater value than being sad because no one would ever chose to be sad over being happy. Everyone lives to be happy. Everyone does actions in order to make themselves happy. No one would ever chose unhappiness when they could chose happiness just as easily.

If I could sit down and have a conversation with John Stuart Mill, the first thing I would ask is..Do you honestly think that anyone would sit down and think about how their actions would affect the overall happiness of a large group of people? It is just extremely difficult to take into consideration everyone’s happiness.

Expediency is said to allow too many white lies. But like in one of my previous blogs, there are lies that dont constitute as being bad lies. Although, the majority of people would say that lying is bad, in the case of the dying grandmother, would anyone really say that it was a poor choice on the daughter’s part to tell her mothr that she could fight off the sickness? Of course not. Of course there are circumstances in which people make the wrong decision and decide to lie about something stupid such as denying that the girl youre with is indeed your girlfriend and not your ugly cousin from out of town(Boone’s example). But does any of this make any sense? Who knows. Point being that there are lies that could be in a sense..good.

The concept of utilitarianism definitely asks too much of everyday normal people. How could a person honestly stop and think about every action and whether or not it will increase or decrease the overall happiness of people? The world is too fast pace. There is absolutely no way to take into account everyone’s happiness. Everyone has their own opinions on what they consider right and wrong. And just like that, everyone makes their own decision according to what they believe.

In the reading that was assigned to our group Mill stated that the objectors to Utilitarianism often state that it is “an immoral doctrine” and immediately compare it to expediency. I could put the paper that I wrote on the subject on here but to summarize it all up..Mill’s arguement that expediency is lying and that all lying is bad no matter what the circumstance is. In our group discussion, Marcel brought up a the time that his mom “lied” to his grandmother and said that she was going to be just fine even though the truth of the matter was that the sickness she was suffering from was overcoming her body. Is this really a bad lie? Does it decrease the overall happiness of everyone? I dont think so. I think it actually raises everyone’s hopes, even though in the back of their mind they know the truth. But this “expedient” decision could raise hope to his grandmother and allow her to live a little bit longer.

Mill’s states that there are “higher” pleasures and that they are better than the “lower pleasures. This theory of his is extremely hard to prove. I would say that I somewhat agree with this. There are pleasures that only humans can feel. Animals lack the sense to feel certain things that humans can because humans have the ability to rationalize. But the reason that I “somewhat” agree with this theory is because who are we to say that what we feel is better than that of animals’?

I think everyone is morally responsible for their actions. How could someone be completely unaware of what might result from their action. Of course there are times that I think could be put as exceptions like the example we used in class about donating money to an organization that you thought was for a good cause but turned out to be funding something horrible. I completely agree with the concept of uilitarianism because people should not be mad at actions that are supposed to be considered good.