Sign Up Now
Get instant access to over 1 million+ study documents
OR
Already registered? click here to login
By creating your account, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and student honor code.
The three approaches to ethics today involve whether one does good out of (1) the need to maximize the well-being of the human race, (2) the need to live according to a moral rule ("Do unto others as you would have others do unto you") or (3) the belief that helping people is charitable and benevolent (virtue ethics). The Virtue Ethicists' central concepts are virtue, practical wisdom and eudaimonia.
A virtue, such as honesty, generosity, caring and helping, is not something learned or practiced until it becomes a habit. It is a disposition that comes from a mindset that cannot be observed by others in a single act. A virtuous person has thought about why it is valuable to be honest and caring and has taken it to be part of their disposition. They do not find otherwise in their life and are shocked whenever they do not find it in the lives of others. It is displayed in acts, not words and is not found in a single act, but in a life-style that practices many acts of kindness day after day.
The qualities of virtue have been discussed in many philosophies, beginning with Aristotle, who spoke about phronesis, and eudaimonia. Eudaimonia is a key to the new virtue ethic, being the final area that is usually discussed. It is an Aristotelian term meaning "happiness" or "flourishing," or "well-being." Only a rational being can experience eudaimonia, the state of being satisfied with oneself because one is virtuous. It denotes one who is living well as...
The good life is the morally meritorious life, responding to the demands of the world, being a good human being with virtues that enable them to live a whole life. (Swanton 2003)
List of Works Cited
Annas, Julia. The Morality of Happiness. New York: Oxford University Press. 1993
Crowell, Steven. "Existentialism." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. 2004.
Dreyfus, Harold. What Computers Can't Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence. New York: Harper Colophon. 1979.
Haugeland, John. Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. 1998.
Taylor, Charles. "Self-interpreting animals," Philosophical Papers I: Human Agency and Language. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. 1985.
Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling. Tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1983.
Korsgaard, Christine. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. 1996.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. "Existentialism is a Humanism," in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. Walter Kaufmann, Ed. Cleveland: Meridian Books. 1968.
Swanton, Christine. Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic…
Works Cited
Annas, Julia. The Morality of Happiness. New York: Oxford University Press. 1993
Crowell, Steven. "Existentialism." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. 2004.
Dreyfus, Harold. What Computers Can't Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence. New York: Harper Colophon. 1979.
Haugeland, John. Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. 1998.
Good Life What is Good Life? The Consequentialism Debate Utilitarian reasoning is regarded as "consequentialist." The other approach of human actions' analysis is called "deontologist" reasoning. Utilitarian and deontological reasoning have very little in common. They are similar only in the sense that they both attempt to establish which human actions are appropriate and which ones are not. Apart from that, there is no other similarity. The differences arise in their adopted
Philosophy? When one attends a post-secondary institution, one of the most challenging things is to find your place, both scholarly and intellectually. That is, who am I supposed to be? What do I want to be? What is my passion in academia? Moreover, ultimately, what contribution do I wish to make within the scholarly community? With that said, then, this brings me to how I found philosophy as an interest
Roger Smith, a quite competent swimmer, is out for a leisurely stroll. During the course of his walk he passes by a deserted pier from which a teenage boy who apparently cannot swim has fallen into the water. The boy is screaming for help. Smith recognizes that there is absolutely no danger to himself if he jumps in to save the boy; he could easily succeed if he tried.
(It will be recalled that Wright's then unpublished Lawd Today served as a working model for The Outsider.) Cross, in his daily dealings with the three women and his fellow postal workers feel something akin to nausea. His social and legal obligations have enslaved him. He has inherited from his mother a sense of guilt and foreboding regarding his relationship to women and his general awareness of amoral physical
Existentialism takes the human subject -- the holistic human, and the internal conditions as the basis and start of the conceptual way of explaining life. Taking idealism From Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, then building upon it, existentialist thinkers strip away the external and look at questions that surround human existence, and the conditions of that existence, rather than hypothesizing or dreaming of different forms of being. Thus, the inward
He believed strongly in the government's protection of civil rights and equal opportunities for all its citizens. If a government failed to do so, he called for civil disobedience. King (1986) stated that freedom must be taken from the oppressors (p. 292). His concept of meaning was formulated in the crucible of unjust laws and centered on the notion of social justice. This meant attaining freedom, dignity, and social