We aim to get answers that are perceived to be sufficient enough to handle the problem at hand. When simpler explanations are available which also translates as rule of thumb heuristics, people do not seek more sophisticated explanations which takes away a person’s ability to think at a theoretical level. Perspective two, explains how the understanding and the defining of critical thinking is varied but most often misinterpret. Three concepts were used to show where people would go wrong in understanding critical thinking
This theory state that people should make decisions because of who they are and not because some rules or law that guides them. If people make decisions based merely on anticipation of only good consequences there would not be new discovery. Discoveries are the unknown and in the unknown you cannot anticipate the consequences of what we do not know so in other words there would be no risk taking. Virtue ethics theory allows one to make decisions by evaluating a situation, weighing circumstances and coming to conclusion on the best possible result. It is not dependent on the greatest outcome because not all right decisions leads to the greatest utility.
Given these points, being able to form a virtuous habit and applying it to situations will not only create a morally virtuous person but also an virtuous intellectual. If the individual is reluctant at giving back a valuable item that someone had lost to fulfill his or her own desires then that person is not considered virtuous. While, another is more than ready to help that person in distress, and if he or she already had been practicing good virtuous ethics then
While Hobbes utilizes Laws of Nature in his argumentation, they are not pervasively tying, but rather apply just when one's life is secure. On a basic level, we are all disposed to submit to them, yet in practice the requirement for self-protection outweighs everything else. Hobbes should in this way not be mistaken for a Natural Law scholar. Moreover, Hobbes considered men to be generally equivalent. Albeit one man may be physically more grounded than another and one quicker witted than another, these distinctions don't create any kind of natural chain of command.
One of the biggest philosophical debates is whether morals are objective or subjective. When debating the two, it becomes clear that morals are a mix of both subjectivity and objectivity. There are a few morals that are objective, such as don’t kill and innocent person for no reason, but most morals are subjective to the situation they take place in. For example, it usually is not okay to kill another person, however, if someone does it to save their own life it becomes acceptable. Many perspectives of ethical theory do not take this mix into consideration and state that morals are either completely subjective or objective.
I like using this as a method to judge actions and interpreting them as good or bad. I also see where the one writer disagreed with this based on Aristotle’s excluding murders, adulterers as always extreme so they did not count in his theory. Since it was a difference in degrees, there is no way to argue in favor of the mean. I however, can see in society that we have adopted the mean theory in a way. How we judge a cold blood, pre-planned murder and an out of passion in the moment murder is by degrees.
There is something in this idea that can be applied to morality. Some actions, like journeys, have value regardless of the outcomes they produce. Williams brings this point about to show how the utilitarian’s focus on consequences might not be the best way to assign value to actions, since it has no way of accounting for the intrinsic values actions may have. Here I have to agree with Williams. The manner in which consequentialist judge actions does not seem to allow any room for considering a person’s intent behind choosing to commit that act.
To be virtuous you have to make choices for the right reason, the choices that are made have to follow the components to virtue to be considered virtuous. Aristotle voiced, “Also, we are angry and frightened without choice, but the virtues are certain kinds of choices, or not present without choice” (1106a 2-4). Not all choices are going to be virtuous ones because of the choices that are made. Not all choices have a good outcome and they could potentially not become a virtuous person. Aristotle deemed, “And for these reasons, the virtues and vices are not predispositions either, since we are not called good or bad, nor are we praised or blamed, simply for being predisposed to feel something” (1106a 7-9).
For the reason that Utilitarianism only considers one normative factor, the maximisation of overall happiness, and because it considers all pleasure/happiness to have value, it often conflicts with our common-sense morality and allows for great individual deviation from social norms. It is in this way that Utilitarianism allows for injustice, immoral actions and the violation of human rights. I shall provide an example that demonstrates that in some instances Utilitarianism can be counterintuitive and furthermore give us the morally wrong answer as to which act we ought to perform. The first example involves a surgeon who is faced with the decision of killing one healthy patient, harvesting their organs and transplanting them into five patients who are dying in order to save their lives or doing nothing and allowing the five sick patients to die. Utilitarianism maintains that the surgeon do the act that produces the maximum overall amount of utility, namely, the surgeon must kill the one healthy patient to save the five others.
This question is still being debated today: Was dropping the atomic bombs during WWII justified? First, many believe dropping the atomic bombs was not justified because innocents were killed by a country focused on revenge. For example, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor the US was mad, and rightly