‘’Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end’’. The third imperative says that we as humans should all live moral lives; we cannot depend on anyone or anything else. "Therefore, every rational being must so act as if he were through his maxim always a legislating member in the universal kingdom of ends." An important strength of Kant’s ethical system is that Kant does not specifically set any deontological rules. Kant talks about the Summon Bonum, ‘’the real object of our will’’, he says that we cannot achieve this without our own morality entering into the equation for making decisions.
To understand truth we must be completely sure of it, this requires a rational method of inquiry based on doubt. Methodical doubt involved deliberately doubting everything possible in the least degree whatever remains will be known with absolute certainty. For empiricism we have the belief that all knowledge is of the senses. We are a tabula rasa, a blank slate, that all ideas start with sensation and reflection, we can only think about something after we have experienced them. Although both the empiricists and rationalist both came to the same problem how could we ever know anything outside of our own perceptions.
Existentialism is a philosophical theory that states that each individual has absolute freedom of choice and each has the responsibility to regulate one’s own actions. Existentialists believe that life has no universal meaning thus the pursuit of any greater truth is unnecessary and trivial (Existentialism). In slight contrast, absurdists believe that in the trivialality of a universal meaning, but that the pursuit itself may contain greater truths (Belanger). However, both believe that the world as a whole is purely nonsensical and illogical (Existentialism). Camus’ philosophical beliefs are evident throughout his first work, The Stranger.
As a further definition, Mackie posits that an objective moral value has the quality of ‘ought-to-be-pursued-ness’, it is something one should or ought do because it contains an inherently normative aspect. If Mackie’s argument is to succeed, it must prove that this supposed normative aspect has no existence within any act in itself, but has its origin in the agent of said act, and as such, all moral claims are false. Mackie’s exposition of moral relativism comes in the form of two main arguments, the first being his ‘argument from relativity’, the second, his ‘argument from queerness’. It is with the argument from relativity that I shall be here concerned. The argument from relativity is based around the purely ‘descriptive’ idea that it is an empirically observable fact that there seems to be
It is therefore not surprising that the grounding for this notion has been the subject of heavy debate. Taking central stage in the history of this debate are Hume and Kant and their examinations of the concept have been very influential. I will attempt to show how they unfold their different conceptions of cause and effect and how the two compare to each other. A note on Terminology: While Hume and Kant discuss more or less the same subject matter they do as most philosophers, discuss it in their own (or that most native to them) terminology. For sake of clarity I shall utilise the concepts of each in their respective sections.
With a pragmatic approach individuals aim to achieve realistic and sensible answers through debate and the realization that situations change over time and answers need to be reassessed and reevaluated in order to determine a correct approach to the answer. Traditional pragmatism such as, William James, Charles Pierce, John Dewey, Josiah Royce, and George Herbert Mead, viewed all human understanding as intrinsically fallible; they saw knowing as an opened quest for greater certainty, grounded in practical experience and motivated by the desire of successful actions. Through pragmatism, no one group or individual has the one answer to the problem based on conflict resolution theories, but the entire group of individuals is responsible for the final decision on current issues, making no one the winner, but all a winner and part of the decision-making
Second, he argues that it is only by virtue of something being sentient that it can be said to have interests at all, so this places sentience in a different category than the other criteria: "The capacity for suffering and enjoying things is a prerequisite for having interests at all, a condition that must be satisfied before we can speak of interests in any meaningful way" (175). That is, Singer is trying to establish that if a being is not sentient, the idea of extending moral consideration to it makes no sense. This negative argument is important, because one common criticism of Singer is that his criterion ends up excluding humans who are no longer sentient (like those in an irreversible coma); Singer is content to accept that consequence, but it is important that he show why the exclusion of some humans by his criterion is not problematic, given that he has criticized other criteria
Dissoi Logoi contains opposing arguments that can be argued either way. Its relevance to Rhetoric is that it allows us as readers to see that no argument can be made both bad and good, just and unjust, seemly and shameless. In our own minds we know right versus wrong, but not everyone has the same vision of what is right and what is wrong. What is wrong to one can be right to another and vice versa which appeals to the logos aspect of rhetoric. These notion of contradiction within this writing are rhetoric.
Because it engages the whole self without a fixed yardstick it can be called a personal reflection…. [I]n this reflection the self is in question; what is at stake is the definition of those inchoate evaluations which are sensed to be essential to our identity (117). Taylor makes this claim about responsibility for self in opposition to Sartre’s characterization of the human condition as nothingness and absolute freedom. Sartre derives from this condition an understanding of freedom as the radical, infinite openness of the freedom of our choices and concludes that it is this freedom that characterizes our fundamental moral dilemma. Taylor argues that it is not the weight of the openness that defines our moral selves or the moral dilemmas we face, but the fact that various choices necessarily blind and pull us in different directions.
The essence of the message of the Analects is the key concept that individuals should think independently, and he strived to define concepts in an abstract, universal manner in which they could be applied to multiple cultures could understand them. When it came to interpersonal relations, Confucius believed in humanity and it’s ability to learn from one another. An example of this is 7.28 where he says, “Maybe there are people who can act without knowledge, but I am not one of them. Hear much, pick the best and follow it, see much, and keep a record of it: this is the best substitute for innate knowledge.” (p. 32). Confucius’ idea of the role of a gentle man was that a man is nothing unless he is a gentleman.