Philosophy Plato

Descartes: Dualism and Ethics While Descartes Meditations don't actually mention the word 'ethics' his writing nevertheless deals with them to some extent. In his Meditations, Descartes talks about the nature and existence of both God and human beings. He ponders how humans can ever be sure of their own existence, because their senses lie to them all of the time, and there is no way to prove that what they can see, hear, and touch really exists.

This deals with ethics because people must believe in their senses in order to act on what they see around them. With the belief that nothing is real, there is no reason to remain ethical about anything. Ethics relate to how a person perceives the world and what they do about what they see. Because of this, perceptions and senses must be believed in order to know how to respond to the stimulus that the senses receive.

Descartes approaches this be examining whether the senses can be believed, and then looking at whether there is any evidence that God exists. If He does, why does he allow people to be deceived by their senses? Eventually, Descartes comes to the conclusion that God must exist because He is believed in and anything that can be thought of must be more important than the thought. Whatever is perceived must be true, and since God can be perceived, He must exist.

Also, Descartes points out that nothing can exist without a cause, and the existence of the object must be greater than that cause. In other words, God exists because there is clear and convincing evidence that He exists, and because people believe that he exists, the cause of their belief must be the actual existence of God. This is a somewhat circular and slightly confusing argument that Descartes makes.

While I do agree that God exists, Descartes' logic seems flawed in that he tries to prove one thing by proving another. The catch is that the second thing can only be proved by the existence of the first, so the argument goes around and around again. This argument becomes difficult to believe in, but yet people who trust in their own senses have to believe that there are some valid criteria for saying that their senses are legitimate.

The basic conclusions in Descartes' Meditations are as follows: his senses lie to him and God allows him to be deceived by the very senses that make him human; God can be proven to exist because he is believed to exist; the human mind and the body are separate entities, because the thinking of the mind does not have to be related to the senses the body has; and each person is subject to many infirmities and errors simply because of their nature.

He comes to these conclusions through the use of intellect and logical reasoning, as well as an analysis of how human beings use their senses and their minds to perceive the world and react to the stimuli that they receive. He reaches the final conclusion about error and human nature by realizing that he cannot possibly know with certainty that everything he believes to.