Off the Precipice into the Gorge: Why Utilitarianism Can’t Save Us Introduction In his article, “A Critique of Utilitarianism” Bernard Williams is concerned that consequentialism has found plausibility in people’s minds due to a misunderstanding of and negative reaction to non-consequentialist theories. [1] Though he does not offer an alternative ethical theory, Williams successfully takes on the project of exploring how utilitarianism and those who uncritically embrace it have accepted an unworkable standard for defining right actions. Williams offers a unique and penetrating thesis: to define right action only by reference to whether it produces a good “state of affairs” necessitates a fundamental clash between an agent’s moral character and that allegedly right action. [2] In its attempt to compensate and maintain viability as a moral theory, utilitarianism smuggles into its calculus the agent’s non-utilitarian-based moral feelings. 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.
This dehumanizes and reduces the person to being an object. Therefore, a person’s judgment is the determining factor for what is to be believed rather than the external religious or secular values. “The Existentialists maintain that part of the human condition is the experience of aloneness…. The sense of isolation comes when we recognize that we cannot depend on anyone else for our own confirmation; that is, we alone must give a sense of meaning to life, and alone must decide how we will live” (Corey G. (2011) p. 143 - 144). According to the theory of existentialism, aloneness is an unavoidable condition of our humanity.
If abstractness, projection of people’s emotions, and uselessness of art create morality in art, then the art itself cannot be moral or immoral, thus proving Wilde’s theory true. There are different examples in the book The Picture of Dorian Gray that shows Dorian’s projection of his own feelings onto art rather than just letting the art be a form of pleasure. Dorian constantly projects meaning and pulls out morals from art, which leaves Dorian feeling poisoned. At one point he even tells Lord Henry that he was never going to forgive him for being poisoned with a book (Wilde 180). Lord Henry responds to this by noting that Dorian was beginning to moralize, and this was a negative thing because he believed that the books and art themselves did not make morals, therefore art could not be poison.
Use the word “because” to connect your judgment to your reasons. Example: The films of Kevin Smith, from Clerks through Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, should be avoided because the humor is sophomoric, the language offensive, and the dialogue crowded with unintelligible pop-culture references. Body of Argument Reason One • First Criteria. State, as a topic sentence, your judgment on the first evaluative criteria, and use appropriate transition words/phrases to move from thesis to first reason. Also, restate the wording of the first reason so it doesn’t simply copy the reason as you stated it in the complete thesis.
This essay constructs a defence against Susan Sontag’s argument against interpretation. In her essay ‘Against Interpretation’ Sontag voices a clear stand point on her distaste for interpretation of writing and works of art, she assumes “The modern style of interpretation excavates; it digs ‘behind’ the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one”i. She suggests that pieces of creativity are set in their structure and meaning, and that an object, performance or written piece is not to be interpreted and to do otherwise would void it’s true meaning, that interpretation is a superfluous extra. Sontag herself says “From now until the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art”ii, a constant battle against the critics of creativity, the discussion of works of art and their interpretation can be the most vital defence against the people who hate against modern artists and their apparent lack of talent or content. Many modern artists today come under attack for their work, society hissing against the dot paintings of Damien Hurst, the un-made bed of Tracey Emin and other high profile artists whose work is deemed ‘talentless’.
Check your notes; below is a succinct synopsis of that introductory discussion: “Waiting for Conventions” In Waiting for Godot, Beckett implements broken conventions of traditional theatre in order to successfully satirize the detrimental nature of the human condition symbolized throughout this absurdist play (which seems to have no plot). A certain level of tension is created by this plays lack of plot which leaves the audience expecting something to happen that never comes. This lack of plot to some overshadows the reasoning behind why Beckett does this. Although these broken conventions can act as a looking glass into the true meaning of the play, they require the audience to do a certain amount of searching to crack the nut which is Waiting for Godot. Waiting for Godot, unlike many plays follows no specific plot, a concept in which most conventional plays ought to have in order to rope in an audience member to the contents and morals of the play.
Another characteristic of Dadaists is to hate any attempt of intellectual analysis based on their work. What is important for someone who wants to understand Dada is to realize the state of mental and psychological tension in which it flourished. The movement involved theatre, visual arts, poetry, art theory, graphic design and many art manifestoes. "Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point of
Christian Metz's Le Grande Syntagmatique provides film viewers with a coded system for deconstructing cinema. Although this system is sufficient for deconstructing classical narrative films, it is not sufficient in deconstructing avant-garde films such as Daisies. In Christian Metz's essay "Problems of Denotation in the Cinema", Metz arrives at the theory that filmic denotation is primarily a question of syntagmatic considerations by examining the "relationship between cinematographic language and language itself" (Metz, p. 108). To Metz, cinematographic symbolism "must be born out of the film" (p.119). He argues that "the principal figures of cinematographic language originally aimed to make stories more alive for connotative purposes, and this concern with connotation resulted in increasing, organizing, and codifying denotation" (p. 118).
However, they proposed an ideal to strive for, the director should use the commercial apparatus the way a writer uses a pen and, through the mise en scene, imprint their vision on the work. While recognizing that not all directors reached this ideal, they valued the work of those who neared it. Auteur theory was used by directors of the new wave movement of French cinema in the 1960’s as justification for their intensely personal and idiosyncratic films. One of the ironies of Auteur theory is that, at that very moment Truffaut was writing, the breakup of the Hollywood studio system during the 1950’s was ushering in a period of uncertainty and conservatism in American cinema, with the result that fewer of the sort of films Truffaut admired were actually being made. Starting in the 1960s, some film critics began criticizing Auteur theory's focus on the authorial role of the director.
Llosa believes that science and technology cannot do such things, only literature can. Snow’s view on Llosa’s statement is questionable because of its relentlessness with the polarizing thought process of the modern-day community of literary scholars in that it apparently appears to be downgrading science to an inferior point in which concerns to the pursuit of solidarity knowledge. Llosa argues about what he describes to as a “widespread conception,” basically that literature has become a “dispensable activity.” Llosa believes that the marginalization of literature will make people lose their abilities to survive in the real