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Impact of ethics on decision making
Importance of ethical decision making
Impact of ethics on decision making
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Hayley Rimlinger Professor Rued Philosophy of Psychology Extra Credit Thoughts on Susan Wolf’s, “The Reason View” When thinking about the topic of free will I personally think it is the ability to make decisions that we WANT to make, and not being forced to do so. Susan Wolf explores the idea of our independence by looking at three different views exploring our freedom and responsibility. The first view Wolf talks about is The Real Self View (RSV) which explores the idea that, we are ultimately free when we act on our inmost values whether they are “right” or “wrong”. The next view she explores is The Autonomy View (AV), this view states that “we are free when we act on our own” (Wolf 206). The last view Wolf talks about is The Reason View …show more content…
(RV), Wolf claims that this is the view that is correct and ultimately the view that we must follow in order to be accounted as “free”. This is the view that I am going to be talking about in this paper. Susan Wolf claims that The Reason View states that “We are free and responsible when we do the right thing for the right reasons or could have done so—i.e., when we are able to act in accordance with reason.” (Wolf 213). When looking at The Reason View I personally do not think that It is the best view to follow in accordance to our freedom. Wolf states that in order to be free “we must do the right thing for the right reasons”, but what if our thoughts of what is right differs from someone else? For example: like we talked about in class, someone could rob a convenient store to provide for his/her family and to that person they are doing the right thing for the right reasons, but when you put yourself in the shoes of the cashier that person is stealing from they see that individual as stealing and doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons. Another example would be if someone is a drug addict they feel as if they need to put drugs into their body, so if someone does drugs they might feel as if they are doing the right thing at the time because of how their body or system reacts to the drug. So if we are looking at it from that point of view doesn’t this view ultimately falter because of the fact that it is completely subjective to the individual? We all have different morals and values and I personally think that this is what this view is completely dependent on. So if we all have our own views of what we think is right and morally good then there is ultimately no way to determine whether or not the actions we take make us free.
Wolf explains that ultimately “doing the right thing for the right reasons is precisely what we want to do” (Wolf 215), and that is why it gives us a sense of freedom, but what if this is not true. What if we don’t want to make the right decisions, what is someone is just a morally terrible person and wants to make bad decisions just because they WANT to? I think that them wanting to make the bad decisions would make them free, it might not make them free in the sense that what they are doing is morally good, but if they are making that decision for themselves then I truly believe that is their choice and that is freedom. That is ultimately where my views on freedom differ from Susan Wolf’s views. I would have to say that my views lie more in the realm of what Gary Watson speaks of, and also more within The Real Self View that Wolf talks about. I think that as long as a person is acting in accordance with what they believe they are free, even if what they believe is (in my eyes) terrible this is still truly their belief. For example, like we talked about in class, someone who is a kleptomaniac. If someone truly values the idea of stealing and they act on it then that is ultimately what they want to do, even though we don’t agree with this action this still makes the person free. Now, if someone is stealing because someone else is threatening them, or telling them to do so, then that brings up the case that they are NOT free. They would not be free in doing this because they are not stealing because they want to, they are stealing because someone else is telling them to do so. Another example could be someone doing a favor for someone else, if someone is doing a favor for someone because they want to then what they are doing would make them free, but if they are doing the favor for someone else
because they are being rewarded then they are not doing that favor because they want to, but because there is an incentive, this would not make someone free. In conclusion I personally think that Susan Wolf’s, The Reason View on our freedom is flawed. I think that this view is too constricted in what our freedom can be considered and I think there could be too many objections to it for it to be believable. I think that freedom goes far beyond what she is explaining in this view. But this brings us to question what freedom really is and how are we ever going to be able to determine whether we are actually free or not. I think as human beings we are scared to think that we are not in control of our freedom, but there are underlying factors that ultimately cause us to make certain decisions, and because of this I do not think we will every only have one view of what actually makes us free. But, then again maybe there is not only one specific idea of our freedom, but maybe it is determinate on many factors all coming together. Works Cited Wolf, Susan. “The Reason View.” Agency and Responsibility, Westview , 2000, pp. 205–226.
Mencken’s observations are very relevant and it applies to contemporary society. It is necessary to identify what it means by being “free”. Does being free mean that one has choice of religion and type of government? The type of freedom mentioned previously do not apply to mankind if mankind is not safe and is risk for danger. It is human nature to choose safety over freedom as shown in various examples.
Reading through the very beginning of Susan Griffin’s “Our Secret” felt like reading Shakespeare for the first time as a sticky fingered, toothless, second grader. It just did not make sense...my mind couldn’t quite comprehend it yet. Nothing in the essay seemed to be going in any clear direction, and the different themes in each of the paragraphs did not make sense to me. There was no flow – as soon as you began to comprehend and get used to one subject, she would switch it up on you and start talking about something else that seemed unrelated. As I pushed forward, it seriously was beginning to feel like she was drawing topics out of a hat as she went. That was until I hit around halfway through the second page. This is where Griffin introduces her third paragraph about cell biology: “Through the pores of the nuclear membrane a steady stream of ribonucleic acid, RNA, the basic material from which the cell is made, flows out (234).” She was talking about the basic unit of
“Free will is the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion” (Dictionary.com). The novel Slaughterhouse five portrays the idea of not having free will. The award winning author, Kurt Vonnegut, tells
Susan Wolf, born in 1952, is widely considered one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th and 21st century. One of Wolf’s most renowned works is The meanings of Lives, which drew a lot of attention in the philosophical world for a number of questions that arose from it. Arguably her most widely debated and questioned assertion in The meanings of Lives is “If you care about yourself you’re living as if you’re the center of the universe, which is false.” This however I don’t not believe to be true. Every human being, no matter how successful or unsuccessful, has the right to care for them sleeves and not believe they are the center of the universe while doing so.
The topic of whether it is in the nature of living beings to be naturally good has been examined by several authors throughout previous centuries, for example, Susan Griffin. Using a humanistic perspective, Griffin’s chapter, “Our Secret”, from her book, A Chorus of Stones, approaches this topic and can reflect on her own life and feelings using other people’s stories about fears and their secrets. Combining her personal life stories, Himmler’s life narrative, as well as two sub stories, Griffin’s chapter allows characters to represent human emotions and emphasize the hidden feelings of living beings. Similarly, Plato’s dialogue, Phaedrus, and Franz de Waal’s, The Ape and the Sushi Master, talk about the topic of living beings being naturally
Human beings always believe that what they want to do is ‘up to them,' and on this account, they take the assumption that they have free will. Perhaps that is the case, but people should investigate the situation and find a real case. Most of the intuitions may be correct, but still many of them can be incorrect. There are those who are sceptical and believe that free will is a false illusion and that it only exists in the back of people’s minds, but society should be able to distinguish feelings from beliefs in order to arrive at reality and truth.
According to the Collins Dictionary, “freedom” is defined as “the state of being allowed to do what you want to do”(“freedom”). The definition of freedom is simple, but make yourself free is not easy. Concerning about some common cases which will take away your freedom, such as a time-cost high education attainment. In this essay, I shall persuade that everyone should try his or her best to insist on pursuing freedom. For the individual, it appears that only if you have your personal freedom, can you have a dream; for a country, it seems that only if the country is free, can the country develop; for mankind, it looks like that only if people has their own pursuit of freedom, can their thoughts evolve.
Free will is something that every man/women possess that only they have control over. Every day we make choices that positively or negatively affect us. I have seen people give up their own free will, only to take off the pressure of society, encompassing them and making the “second-handers” (Rand) free will is now loosely expresses and the true definition of the terminology is long lost. But, definitions are opinions and my opinion of free will is we as humans have a choice and it is up to us to utilize what we have available, we have the free will to do what we want. It is important to be free. It is important to make your own choices. And it is most important to be different.
There are a lot of different things that come to mind when somebody thinks of the phrase Free Will, and there are some people who think that free will does not exists and that everything is already decided for you, but there are also people who believe in it and think that you are free to do as you please. An example that explains the problem that people have with free will is the essay by Walter T. Stace called “Is Determinism Inconsistent with Free Will?”, where Stace discusses why people, especially philosophers, think that free will does not exist.
Free-will, the ability one has to act without the constraint of necessity or fate. It the power a person has to act at one’s discretion. Do we really have the freedom to experience what we want, when we choose? Some would say yes while some others will say no, philosophers have argued about this topic and there hasn’t been any particular conclusion yet. It is the ability a person or animal has to choose his or her course of actions. Although most philosophers suppose that the concept of free-will is very closely connected to the concept of moral responsibility.
Most people believe they have free will, they control what they think and do, but what exactly is free will? Free will is the freedom of self-determination and action independent of external causes. It is the ability to make choices. A choice is free if it is consistent with a person 's desires and nature. A example of free will is a person has a choice to either eat a cookie or a brownie.
Imagine starting your day and not having a clue of what to do, but you begin to list the different options and routes you can take to eventually get from point A to point B. In choosing from that list, there coins the term “free will”. Free will is our ability to make decisions not caused by external factors or any other impediments that can stop us to do so. Being part of the human species, we would like to believe that we have “freedom from causation” because it is part of our human nature to believe that we are independent entities and our thoughts are produced from inside of us, on our own. At the other end of the spectrum, there is determinism. Determinism explains that all of our actions are already determined by certain external causes
Free will is generally has two similar key points that revolve around it: moral responsibility and freedom of action. Free action is generally when an agent is exercising their free will. For example, let’s say a man named mark was deciding
Freedom, or the concept of free will seems to be an elusive theory, yet many of us believe in it implicitly. On the opposite end of the spectrum of philosophical theories regarding freedom is determinism, which poses a direct threat to human free will. If outside forces of which I have no control over influence everything I do throughout my life, I cannot say I am a free agent and the author of my own actions. Since I have neither the power to change the laws of nature, nor to change the past, I am unable to attribute freedom of choice to myself. However, understanding the meaning of free will is necessary in order to decide whether or not it exists (Orloff, 2002).
I want to argue that there is indeed free will. In order to defend the position that free will means that human beings can cause some of what they do on their own; in other words, what they do is not explainable solely by references to factors that have influenced them. My thesis then, is that human beings are able to cause their own actions and they are therefore responsible for what they do. In a basic sense we are all original actors capable of making moves in the world. We are initiators of our own behavior.