Final reveiw Flashcards
Sophocles:
• What is the conflict between the human and divine laws in Sophocles’ Antigone? In particular, how does Creon represent the law of the state and Antigone the law of the gods and family? Why does the play end in a tragic collision of these two perspectives rather than a conciliation between them?
Human: creon made law commanded she didn’t bury her brother.
Divine: she should bury her brother.
Antigone: ends up following law of the gods and this results in Creon catching her and punishing her.
Plato:
• In both Plato’s Apology and Crito, we are presented with a depiction of Socrates as morally upright and unwavering in his convictions. Drawing from both dialogues, describe Socrates’ ethical stance. What does he think about his own actions as pursued over the course of his lifetime and the consequences of those actions when he is held accountable for them at the end of his life?
He went around reminding people that they new little. He claimed that god called him as the most wise man because he knows little. He believes that his actions were good, and that he was fulfilling his purpose. This purpose was to humble men, and to help them to search deeper for knowledge. In the apology he admits that he was not as invovled in politics as he shoudl have been then in the crito he expresses that if you have a problem with the law and he failed to do so. He disproves all of them but is still convicted. he did not run away because he believed that we hold a duty to the law. It has protected him and provided for him through out.
as I have no adequate knowledge of things in the underworld, so I do not think I have .. I do kno’;, however that it is wicked and shameful to do wrong, to disobey ones superior, be he god or man. I shall never fear or avoid things of which I do not’ know, whether they may not be good.
Aristotle:
• How does habituation function in the development of moral virtue for Aristotle? Are we born virtuous, vicious, or neither? How does his emphasis on the significance of habituation help us to answer this question? What exactly is being habituated, according to Aristotle?
q
Book of Job:
• In The Book of Job, we find a pious and just man who is suddenly singled out by God and Satan in a most surprising way. What are we to learn about the ethics of God, piety, and faith through Job’s story?
God doesn’t always use trials to punish people. Trials can happen to even the best.
piety: communicaiton between job and god. Job praises the lord and admits he has given him all. Later he begings to question god and he basically tells him that he doesn’t have to answer him and the job should trust him.
Faith: If you maintain your faith. Which action . which job showed in trying to remain positive you will be rewarded .
Jesus Christ:
• What kind of ethical system does Jesus put forward in “The Sermon on the Mount”? How must one live in order to live an ethical Christian life according to this passage? As you cannot cover every element of the passage, focus on what you find to be the most important rules of conduct.
The golden rule. Do unto others as they would do unto you.
You must live a rightous life. This meaning that you are selfless. blessing those around you even those who hurt you and use you. You are to
Islam, Empire of Faith:
• In the movie, Islam: Empire of Faith, we are shown the origins of the the Muslim faith. What kind of person was Muhammad and what kind of religion did he espouse? How was Islam different than the tribal religions out of which he emerged? Why was his message so appealing at that time and place in history?
Muhammed was a wise man and had helped people solve their conflicts.
He espoused the muslim religion Islam.
The reliegion was so different because they rejected idols, and only worshiped one god. This was radically different than the others.
one God=one people… no seperation of tribes. means being one people.It spread quickly because the message applied to the masses and gave them hope for a better life beyond oppression. It meant that blood did not matter, unity could be accomplished through faith.
Immanuel Kant:
• What is the categorical imperative according to Kant? What does this imperative command that we do? How does the categorical imperative function in the third formulation, wherein we are commanded to treat rational nature in ourselves and others as an end in itself and never as a means?
Categorical emperitive. Act as though your actions would become a universal law.
It keeps us from acting in ways that can damage other, and the environement. This also provides a way to measure wether an action in a certain circumstnce is ok, it keeps us from restricting ourselves with set rules.
Third is that we must not treat others as a means to an ends. We must realized that they have their own goals and dreams. We must respect them. We can utilize eachother as a means, but we must respect them in the process.
Mary Wollstonecraft:
• Wollstonecraft provides a critique of Enlightenment thought while maintaining a belief in its fundamental presuppositions and goals. Using arguments based on the nature of reason, what are her criticisms of the education of women in her time?
The education system was to teach women to be wives, but did not teach them to use their reasoning, but rather teaches them like the military to follow orders.
Learning to become autonomous you can be productive, and successful. Knowledge can be maintained and therefore provide the worth that all rational being crave .
this is making girls not well rounded and unproductive.
It focuses them on physical beauty which is short term, and when your beauty is gone. Then you are left with nothing.
Plus what if they don’t get married, or their husband dies?
You train women, and you don’t help them to become an adult and they stay children. .
Women are kept in the present and thinking about here and now. With no time to be concerned with goals and sprititual life.
John Stuart Mill: • Discuss Mill’s conception of utilitarianism. What are the basic goals of the theory? Using the greatest happiness principle, explain how utilitarianism pertains to the achievement of human happiness?
To act for the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people. The goal is not to simply provide happiness for the greatest amount but to relieve suffering from the greatest amount of people.
Friedrich Nietzsche:
• What is the difference between the valuation of “good and bad” versus the valuation of “good and evil” according to Nietzsche? How is the former indicative of an aristocratic mode of valuation and the latter indicative of a Judeo-Christian mode? How does good/bad develop into good/evil through a revaluation of values?
“the good themselves named themselves”
Good: powerful, rich, comanding
Bad: plain, common, and low
jews reversed this and created:
Good:plain and common
Evil: powerful rich, comanding
Jews/ Christianity vs aristocracy
Jew started the revolution ( because they had resentement)
changed what is good and bad. they fought by attacking the others values.
spiritual revenge, and it was so strong we can’t even see it.
Simone de Beauvoir:
• What is the relationship between childhood and the inauthentic attitude of the serious person in Beauvoir’s ethics? What function does adolescence play in our moral development according to Beauvoir?
Most wide spread because we all started as children. We try to keep the pregiven values.
submerges freedom into object, category, label, cause and absolute.
-renews denial of freedom.
example: Ii have sworn my allegiance to a certain political party and so it is impossible for me to vote for someone the opposite party.
as child you are given values: what is right or wrong
must submit to adults’
irresponsible’
believe people are determined by their roles so every thing they do is as their profession.
they do not realize they are free that everything isn’t as fixed as they veiw them
-kids can pretend to be something… if you continue this as an adult they are unethical because they are hiding
Racial Privilege and Affirmative Action:
• What is white privilege as explained by Peggy McIntosh in her article, “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”? How does this notion relate to the idea of affirmative action?
She relates it to sexism, in the fact that men do not wish to see the problem, and the same is with white privlege. She gave examples of how whites are are upheld in society and have an advantage in comparrison to the blacks. 3. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live. 4. I can be reasonably sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me. 5. I can go shopping alone most of the time, fairly well assured that I will not be followed or harassed by store detectives. 6. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely and positively represented. 7. When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.
This relates to the idea of affrimitave action in the fact that the blacks are underprivilaged because of their history, and the veiws and bias from the days of slavery are still effecting them.
The word privilage sounds positive,and is misleading. The kind of privilege that gives license to some people to be, at best, thoughtless and, at worst, murderous should not continue to be referred to as a desirable attribute. Such “privilege” may be widely desired without being in any way beneficial to the whole society..Power from unearned privilege can look like strength when it is, in fact, permission to escape or to dominate. But not all of the privileges on my list are inevitably damaging. Some, like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to you, or that your race will not count against you in court, should be the norm in a just society and should be considered as the entitlement of everyone
Historical Debt and Reparations:
• What are some of the key arguments that Ta-Nehisi Coates makes in favor of reparations in his essay, “The Case for Reparations”? How does bell hooks’ descriptions of the black (particularly female) slave experience from Ain’t I a Woman? help to bolster Coates’ argument?
We plundered blacks. We used their cheap labor, and buying and selling them. This money went into and boosted the american economy.
We have scarred them with the history and knowlege of the lynching of their forefathers, and the families separated.
Jim crow laws, and Federal Housing Act also: That emblem was not to be awarded to blacks. The American real-estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle. As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ code of ethics warned that “a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood … any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values.” A 1943 brochure specified that such potential undesirables might include madams, bootleggers, gangsters—and “a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.”
These areas are todays ghettos.
Shows the devaluing of black women and societies veiw of them.
Animal Rights:
• What is Singer’s argument regarding granting rights to non-human animals? How does he use the phenomenon of suffering to make his case for animal liberation?
If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration. No matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like suffering—in so far as rough comparisons can be made—of any other being. If a being is not capable of suffering.It is not merely the act of killing that indicates what we are ready to do to other species in order to gratify our tastes. The suffering we inflict on the animals while they are alive is perhaps an even clearer indication of our speciesism than the fact that we are prepared to kill them.6
we treat them as a means to an end
The Ethics of Capitalism:
• What are some of the arguments from Stanley Bergman and/or Dan Stewart in favor of an ethical form of capitalism? What are some of the arguments that Slavoj Žižek and David Harvey give to critique capitalism as an unethical economic system?
Dan stewart says that if we implement “ do unto future generations as you would have them do unto you”. He blieves that capitolism can be ethical. the only unethical portion of it is that it is only concerned about the here and now,
Stanley Bergman: catipolism is only as good as its capitolists.
From my perspective, this notion that “capitalism” is inherently unethical is not only philosophically wrong but factually refutable. The problem is not with capitalism; the problem is with those capitalists who focus on the present without caring for the future.Consider the extraordinary human achievement of the past two centuries generated by capitalism. As John Mackey reminds us in his book, Conscious Capitalism, 85 percent of the globe lived in extreme poverty just 200 years ago. Today, that number is 16 percent. Life expectancy has more than doubled, individual freedom has bloomed across the globe, and extraordinary innovation spurred by capitalism has changed daily life immeasurably. No other economic system yet devised has the power to create such positive change.
