When we fail to follow our duty, we are behaving immorally. Typically in any deontological system, our duties, rules, and obligations are determined by God. Being moral is thus a matter of obeying God. Deontological moral systems typically stress the reasons why certain actions are performed. Simply following the correct moral rules is often not sufficient; instead, we have to have the correct motivations.
The two dominant theories of morality are relativism and absolutism. The former is the position which states that moral propositions do not reflect objective or universal moral truths but instead make claims relative to social, cultural, historical or circumstantial conditions. The latter is the ethical belief that there are absolute standards against which moral questions can be judged. The theory claims that certain actions are right or wrong regardless of the context of the act. Therefore, actions are inherently moral or immoral, regardless of the beliefs and goals of the individual, society or culture that engages in the action.
His belief was that if nonviolence led to a nonsolution, and cruelty still surfaced in the community, then you should defend yourself by using any means necessary. I concur with his assessment of how to respond with the misdeeds of both former and today’s society. Although it can be viewed as unnecessary and idiotic, initiating violence can be utilized to defend against tyranny, ultimately shielding the innocent lives of those that are victimized. Malcolm X’s main idea is to uphold the entitlement of security and justification. He believed it was “a crime for anyone who is being brutalized to continue to accept that brutality without doing something to defend himself.” This corresponds with the second amendment in the United States Constitution: the right of individuals to keep and bear arms.
He lived during the time where segregation was everywhere in the United States, not as a white man, but as an African-American. He wrote the letter during his stay in Birmingham jail after conducting a peaceful march in that city. He led the march in order to attack the city’s segregation system, but instead, he was imprisoned for disturbing the peace. After first stating the purpose of his letter, Dr. King used logos to start his counterargument. When he wrote in the letter, “You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham.
to disobey a law that they feel is unjust. As martin luther king Jr. , wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, "I submit that an individual who breaks a law that his conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law. " Civil disobedience is most justifiable when prior lawful attempts to rectify the situation have failed; and when the acts of civil disobedience are done to force the society to recognize the problem; when performed openly and publicly; and when the actor will accept the punishment. Many proponents urge that civil disobedience be used only in the most extreme cases, arguing that the Constitution provides many opportunities to voice one's grievances without breaking the law. Opponents of civil disobedience see it as a threat to democratic society and the forerunner of violence and anarchy.
Jails were managed by the local sheriff department they housed individuals convicted of misdemeanors, and crimes from small infractions to severe crimes like murder. Jail and Prison Comparison King Henry II who demanded that these buildings needed to be built introduced the first jails in England in 1166 they were first called “gaol”. Originally these jails were going to be used for detaining offenders awaiting trial. Between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries vagrancy started to become a huge problem. Jails were now used to displace people like the poor or the mentally ill.
When the death penalty was no more the jail suffered overcrowding which led to riots, escapes, and prison guards were attacked. The Pennsylvania Prison Society and the Philadelphia Society for Alluarting Misers of Public Prisons stepped in to solve the overcrowding issue by building Pittsburgh Western Penitentiary and Cherry Hill Prison. Today there are 1,200 prisons in the United States and overcrowding is still an issue. Lawmakers believe in three main goals of the correctional system: 1. Punish those who are found guilty of the
Victoria Lopez English 1101 December 10, 2012 Rhetorical Analysis Martin Luther King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”, published in 1964 in his own book Why We Can’t Wait, addresses and explains his current situation to the clergymen of Alabama. On April 12, 1963 Dr. King was arrested in the streets of Birmingham, Alabama for contempt of court and parading without a permit during a protest. His purpose of the letter is to inform the clergymen of his views and the reasons for his “direct action” on the issue of desegregation. Martin Luther King Jr. was the most important voice of the American civil rights movement, which worked for equal rights for all. He was famous for using nonviolent resistance to overcome injustice, and he never got tired of trying to end segregation laws.
For a conscientious observer, this double standard should seriously cause him to question the ability of a consequentialist perspective to prescribe satisfactory moral understanding and guidance. By accommodating an agent’s moral feelings only when they are in accord with utility is indicative of a deeper failure to recognize that such feelings are often expressions of the agent’s own projects and commitments. Thus, to achieve an objective standard of right action, utilitarianism ultimately sacrifices the agent’s integrity by making right action irrelevant to those projects and commitments. The first part of my exposition focuses on what Williams sees as the reason for the popularity of consequentialist ethical theories, which is rooted in an illicit jump from thinking about moral kinds of actions to thinking about moral degrees of outcomes. The rest of my exposition explains how this jump directly leads to the
Immorality therefore is the violation of such law. Kant goes on to argue that the morality of any action can be seen, not by the desired consequences, but by the motive behind the action. Basically, Kant believes that we should act because of the motive not because we see the end results of the action. Consequences of an act are, for the most part, irrelevant to morality; we can control the motives but not control the results. Motives then can be measured by whether or not they can be turned into a universal maxim.