- How much does rationality play a role in your life? How much should it play?
- How much choice do you have in your life? Should you have more or less? Is having choice important? Why or why not?
- Comment on one of Kant's questions:
- What can I know?
- What ought I do?
- What may I hope?
Jenna, Marissa, and Megan questions below. Please respond to at least 2 of theirs.
1- Like Kant, do you believe that morality cannot be based on the goals of happiness?
2- How do you distinguish self interested inclinations and moral duty?
3- Do we try to integrate all the facts in the world into a consistent and unified system?
4- How are right intentions and virtuous qualities to be achieved and encouraged?
Do I have choice in my life? I would say I do have my own choices but I still live under my parents roof so some of my choices are taken away. While living under my parents roof i have to respect their rules. Sometimes I feel that I cannot fully live my life because my parents are not allowing me to do so in a sense. Say, if I moved out of town for some reason my parents would not support it. They contradict their beliefs when they say, "follow your dream." If my dreams mean traveling or moving out of town they would not like that. But i feel responsible for taking care of them as they age so i have to stay in town. It is important to have choice in our life because thats what makes us who we are. I would like to have more choice in my life but that day will be in the future.
ReplyDeleteWhat ought I do? I choose to stay in town and continue my career and the future will all work out.
More questions:
What's the difference between a hypothetical imperative and a categorical imperative?
More questions from Jenna and Megan:
ReplyDelete1- Like Kant, do you believe that morality cannot be based on the goals of happiness?
2- How do you distinguish self interested inclinations and moral duty?
3- Do we try to integrate all the facts in the world into a consistent and unified system?
4- How are right intentions and virtuous qualities to be achieved and encouraged?
I'm going to answer Jenna and Megan's questions #s 1 and 2 together. I believe that morality cannot be based on the goals of happiness because what is right isn't always what makes us feel good. Our self-interested inclinations are often easier to choose over what we know is our moral duty. An example of this is when you find lost money. Our selfish inclinations tell us that we should keep the money, and we know that that would make us happy in the short term. But then our sense of moral duty kicks in, and we think, "What if it were me that lost it?" We are forced to choose between "Finders keepers, losers weepers" and what our gut tells us. The moral thing to do would be to turn the money in so that the person can eventually get it back, but that wouldn't necessarily make you very happy. One way to distinguish our selfish desires and the moral thing to do is to put yourself in the place of the victim (Would you like it if someone stole from you? Would you like it if your significant other cheated on you?) I agree with Kant that morality cannot and should not be based on the goals of happiness.
ReplyDeleteI agree with this to a point. I think that sometimes moral things can be hard and don't allow us feel good. On the other hand, you can look at the 'pay it forward' movement. People make choices everyday to help another person and this in return makes them feel good. Some people may pick up that money and try to seek out the person who lost it or they may use it to pay it forward. I think it depends on the person and how they were raised.
DeleteAlthough I also believe it is hard to be completely Moral. I do not think someone can make moral choices every single day because some decisions can inflict on their happiness. Its a double standard.
I think it is definitely hard to be completely moral, especially every single day, 7 days a week. I think that if there is a person who is that moral, then I assume that their happiness is not as high as one who is moral but also somewhat selfish. I do not think it is bad to be selfish because a lot of times being selfish can bring other people happiness too. Like Ellie, using the pay it forward method can actually be selfish because you may just be doing it to make yourself feel happy and give yourself gratitude, but it also brings another person happiness, which is very important in life.
DeleteI would say that I have a lot of choices when it comes to my life. Like Marissa, I live at home with my dad. Although I live at home, I have a lot of freedom. My dad knows that I make the right decisions and he trusts me when it comes to the decisions I make. He is very flexible in allowing me to make my own choices because that is how we learn and shape our future choices. Along with this freedom, he is also there to always guide me in the right direction or save me when I need it. I think it is the perfect way for me to learn independence, even though I'd love to live away from home.
ReplyDeleteWhat may I hope?
I hope that living at home will allow me to learn responsibility and independence for my future. I hope I can learn from my father about the ability and success to be an adult.
Like you and Marissa, I still live at home and have a lot of freedom. I agree that there is a way to learn is to make your own choices and learn from the bad ones, but I have also learned and shaped my future choices by what my siblings have done. Since I am the youngest, I have seen what my siblings have gone through and I have the options of choosing the same choice and hoping it works better with me, or I can learn from a previous mistake they made and find a better option to shape my future.
DeleteI believe that rationality plays a big part in my life. I think that most of the decisions I make are done in a rational manner. Rationality should always have a part in people's lives because without it, people would be making decisions that may not be beneficial to themselves, their families, or even their community.
ReplyDeleteThere are people in the world who try and integrate all of the facts that are present into a consistent and unified system because they need something rational, such as a law or rule to go by. If they don't have facts to believe in then they don't know what decisions should be considered morally right or wrong unless they are taught at a young age or told otherwise.
I believe that morality, the distinction between right and wrong, can be based on happiness, but to a certain point. When people are happier, they tend to make better decisions and are more compassionate to others. Many people try to make good decisions so that they can try to reach a certain goal of happiness that they are obtaining. There are people in the world that cannot see the goals of happiness as a way of knowing morality because the decisions of right and wrong do not change how happy they are even if they chose something that was in a sense of being wrong.
I feel like I have a lot of choice and freedom in my life most of the time. I get to choose my friends, my clothes, my food, what I spend my money on. But one thing I did not get to choose was whether or not I would attend college. That was a given. I had no choice or say in the matter. If I did have a choice, I probably would still attend, but how come we can't always choose what we want to do with the rest of our lives? I think it is important to be able to choose most things in your life, because it is YOUR life. Kant asks the question "what can I hope?" and to answer him, I would have to say I hope that I made the right decision to attend college and to having nursing as my major. I hope to change people's lives for the best and to be successful sooner rather than later.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with your points, and I like how you said you didn't have a choice on whether you were going to college or not. Based off what you said, I didn't really have a choice either. But even though I didn't have a "choice", it is the norm and my entire family has always gone to college, so I've always just expected that's what I'll be doing for another four years or so after high school. It is weird that we can't always choose what we want to do with the rest of our lives. We can have it all mapped out, but life takes us on many different routes and sometimes we can get so far off track that we don't even know what our plan is anymore. I hope that I never get pushed too far off the map where I don't know where to turn. But we can only hope that we make the right decisions, and if we hit a bump in the road, we just have to pick up where we are left and keep trudging along.
DeleteI feel like I have a lot of choice in my life. I have chosen what career path to follow, I chose what college I wanted to go to, I have chosen my friends and I have chosen a lot of what has happened in my life. There are many things that are out of my control, but for the most part, I have the power to put myself in certain situations and then what happens in those situations are often times out of my power. I think we all have different definitions of how much choice we all get. Sometimes our family life or our work life limits the choices that we have, so putting a certain number on our choices is irrational. We all know what we have chosen to do, so based on this, we can determine how much choice we get the next time. I think it’s important that we look at what has happened in the past and determine if we should make our own judgment call or to go with the flow and play it safe. I think it is very important that we have some choice in our lives or we would never learn from our mistakes. If I go to a party or a bad area and something goes wrong or something happens, hopefully I get the chance to choose to not put myself in those kinds of situations anymore. If I had no choice then I wouldn’t learn that it’s not a good idea to go there or do those things.
ReplyDeleteIn answering Kant’s question: “What may I hope,” I hope that I choose the correct career path and make the right decisions regarding my future. I know that I love to help others and so nursing seemed to be the perfect field to put it into practice. I hope that someday I am successful as a nurse and am doing what I love to do, helping others.
Self-interested inclinations are things that are for ourselves. We are only thinking about ourselves and not the consequences or how it’s affecting those around us. Moral duty is doing the right thing even though we may face consequences because of this. But it doesn’t matter because it’s what is morally right. We are doing it for a pure motive.
No I do not believe that morality cannot be based on the goals of happiness. I think that doing something that is morally right can often times lead to happiness. Now that doesn’t mean that our morals will always lead us to happiness, but I definitely would disagree that morality can never be based on happiness. I think when we do something morally, we are always looking for the good. We may have good intentions and still hurt someone, but that doesn’t mean we weren’t seeking a happy future by doing what was morally right. Sometimes doing the right thing doesn’t always lead to a happy ending right away. We have to trust our morals and do what is right. Our morals will thank us down the road when things seem to go our way more often because we are doing what is right.