Blog Number Two

In my last blog post I picked two chapters from our “Problems from Philosophy” book that most interested me. I’m choosing to further explore the chapter “Why should be moral” and am including internet-related articles concerning my topic. I don’t necessarily feel the following are ideas I learned, but they’re more so ideas in which I feel are important to include in my final paper.

In “Why be Moral”, the author states that “other philosophers would argue that being moral is logically required on penalty of being irrational”. The idea is that being moral is synonymous with being rational, where as being immoral is irrational. It’s not a statement that I ever particularly thought about. The subject is very much open to interpretation and a subject I’m definitely interested in exploring. The question is whether or not there could be a situation in which your thinking seems rational, but your actions could be perceived as immoral. I think that there are definitely cases in which this question is more of a true statement than a question at all. For example: Stealing is something I think most people would consider immoral. If you were a parent and you found yourself in a situation in which you and your child were starving, it may be perceived as immoral to steal food, but in that circumstance the need to survive would supersede morality.

http://www3.sympatico.ca/saburns/pg0412.htm

On everything2.com I read an article on an individual’s perspective of why we should be moral. The author states that individual, or private morality, is the moral code by which one (IE. the individual) decides to live by. Most often is it dictated to and directly influenced by the moral code of the society in which one lives. This is a point in which I think is really important to bring up. I think a valid example would be that of James Warren Jones. Jones brought a group of individuals (members of the People’s Temple) to Guyana, South America where he established a “benevolent model communist community (wikipedia). He persuaded these members that the morals of the society in which they lived were in actuality immoral. In the end he created a completely new society in which he influenced people inevitably participate in a mass suicide. With this being said I would definitely say that the society in which we live generally speaking has a tremendous influence of the morals in which we live by. James “Jim” Jones is a sound argument in my opinion because he manipulated a society into believing that something immoral as killing yourself was the right thing for them to do.

everything2.com/index.pl?node_id+1872504
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_jones

I also read about Immanuel Kant’s ideas of moral order, which is as follows:
1. The summum bonum is where moral virtue and happiness coincide.
2. We are rationally obliged to attain the summum bonum.
3. What we are obliged to attain, it must be possible for us to attain.
4. If there is no god or afterlife, it is not possible to attain the summum bonum.
5. God (or the afterlife) must exist.

This is a summarized version that can be found at wikipedia.org. For further information I found a site that involves a much more detailed explanation. The site can be found here:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/

Although I understand Kant's moral order, I can definitely see Jophn Locke and Thomas Hobbes's argument that moral requirements are based on standards of rationality