Personal Ethics Statement Values and ethics are a part of everyday life. The life we live shows the strength of our personal character. All of us need to make immediate and wise decisions. The choices we make should be driven by our own ethics. I believe that people need good ethics to promote a healthy and positive environment for ourselves and others.
One of the most influential theories of society is functionalism. Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) was the founder of the Functionalist perspective, he saw society as being a harmonious, and well integrated system, which had a good balance between interrelated and interdependent parts. Functionalism emphasises the importance of moral consensus and this would help in the maintaining of a society as a positive and stable system. Functionalists often describe a similarity between society and the human body, with each organ having a function which contributes to the working of the greater whole (the heart pumps blood around the veins and arteries, the skin protects the body of external influence and so on). So too with society, where the organs might be the family, religion, education, work as a whole to make society successful.
Functionalism is a consensus perspective. Functionalists believe that society is made up of many disparate parts each fulfilling their individual function, yet also working together for the common good. An excellent way to visualise the functionalist perspective is with the organic analogy made famous by Emile Durkheim in the late nineteenth century. Durkheim compared society to a complex living organism. The heart, lungs, kidneys etc each fulfil their individual roles whilst simultaneously working together to maintain the overall health of the body, or in the case of this analogy, the society.
Family, Government, Education, Religion and the Legal System are all Institutions that shape our daily lives and influence how we live. Functionalists view society as a system with multiple parts. Each part is vital and must work in conjunction with the other in order for society to function. The need for unity between the Institutions is essential, so compromise is reached by all parties. Consensus provides collective agreement and moral consensus maintains social order and stability.
A culture is a set of norms, values, beliefs and goals shared by the members of society, whereby value consensus is the glue that holds the society together. Durkheim is also supporting this basis of idea when he states that that a greater level of happiness and progress in the society can be achieved if people work together rather than competing with each other like animals in a war of all against scarce resources. In his work, he also stated that humans have unlimited desires and there has to be a basic agreement on values. The basic function of consensus is to make social order possible by integrating individuals into social system and direct them to meet the system’s need. Everybody has to internalize their roles and the social order depends on how people play their own roles.
Functionalism is a consensus theory in which they believe that all members agree on the idea that society is a system of interdependant parts held together by a shared culture. Functionalist believe that society is made up of different parts or sub-systems; these are family, education and the economy. The functionalist view on the family is that it is a basic building block of society. They often compare society as to a human body because they see every different part of society contributing to the overall running of it, just like the heart, kidneys or lungs for example. For this reason, they see the family as being vital to the wellbeing of society as it meets some essential needs, such as socialising children.
Dretske also uses the term of biological rationality that describes the behaviour designed by natural selection to achieve a consistent goal of higher fitness. In the following I will explain Dretske’s claim that minimal rationality, in some cases, is less demanding than biological rationality and in other cases more demanding than biological rationality. By saying that minimal rationality is less demanding than biological rationality Dretske refers to the fact that minimal rationality doesn’t exclude irrational behaviour because it simply requires that what is done is done for a reason and not for a good reason. In other words to be minimal rational the behaviour still needs to be explained by the thought but it doesn’t need to be rationally justified by the thought that explains it. Dretske takes the example of a terrorist who blows himself and other people up because, he believed what he was told and he believed that there are virgins waiting for him in heaven.
When functionalists describe society, they will often liken it to the human body, where all of the parts need to work in unison to ensure well being. The different parts of a society are seen to be
Functionalist theory According to functionalist theory society is viewed as a collection of interdependent parts each having a function in the stability and solidarity of the whole. Emile Durkheim the French sociologist who developed this theory described this relationship using the physiological analogy of a body that relies on the proper function of its various integrated organs (the heart, lungs, liver, brain and so forth) in order to maintain homeostasis. The organs of society are its institutions and these evolve and persist to positively contribute to the stability of the whole by socialising the individual into the basic values shared by the consensus of its members. Thus within this theory the individual is seen to be a construct of the values of the society to which he/she belongs and is therefore not considered significant in describing this relationship. Functionalist theory and the family The functionalist perspective of the family is focused on how it contributes functionally to the harmony of the society to which it belongs.
With the right environment, nurture, and determination I’m sure one can excel to their full capacity in traits such as intelligence or athleticism. I may be incorrect and I even might have my own bias but that is what I truly think and believe. Before we tackle on this longly debated predicament, we must understand that there are many different perspectives on the nature versus nurture topic. A biological psychologist might approach the problem focusing on genetic, hormonal, and neurochemical explanations of behavior, leaning more towards