Response to Katie's Question

Assuming the individual that gives their life up for someone else is not suicidal or religious; I think that sacrificing oneself for someone else would have to be a selfless act. The person that dies will never receive the praise or pride that comes from sacrificing themselves as they are not around to achieve it. Someone who is suicidal would receive the death that they want without the social stigma killing them-selves might attach to their families so they get something out of it. Religious people might feel that their act will get them into heaven and so do so in part for the reward after death. In many cases the sort of situation where someone would have to give their life up to another would be split second. They would not have the time to reason through why they were doing it and this would mean they could not think through what it would do for them. This would mean it was likely altruistic. Also, if an atheist sacrificed themselves for someone else, they would believe everything for them was gone as their consciousness dies with them. This would make it a very big sacrifice without personal gain. Someone could give up their life for someone else without realizing they were going to die. They could, for example, donate a kidney and die during surgery. Most people donate an organ for a family member they do not want to lose, so that makes it less than completely selfless. People may have some personal reasons for doing things like donating a kidney that are not completely altruistic, but they are risking their health for the sake of someone else. These people are close to altruism on a scale that has selfishness on one end and altruism on the other. While it is nearly impossible to be completely altruistic we should respect and admire those who come close.

                Should one strive to be altruistic or is it alright for people to maintain selfish qualities?      

 

Response to Cameron's Question on happiness

Happiness is not owed or given to us. In many ways we develop our own level of happiness based on our perspectives in life. Say someone gets their first job. They have many ways they can think about it and these will determine their emotions. They could think that they are getting good experience, have the chance to learn something new and are becoming responsible. They could also think that they have to obey a boss, they have to do something they don’t want to do, and they are working all the time and not making much. It is the same situation, but the first person is going to be much happier. Some areas that impact happiness are the healthiness or our relationships and our physical health. Healthy relationships are at least in part determined by the sort of relationships we saw growing up, but we can choose how communicative and responsive we are to other people. When we listen to and understand where other people are coming from we are less likely to become or remain angry with them and thus determine the stability and happiness we find in our personal relations. We have less control of our health, but a good diet and exercise will probably make us feel better in the long run, even if they are less convenient in the short run. Many times people have told me that one way to feel happier is to think about ten things you enjoyed that day. Although this is a small exercise it captures the idea that we can change our own levels of happiness by thinking about the world in a more positive way. Nature may make this more difficult for some people than others, but nobody says you will be happy or sad and gives us our emotional state. We also are not owed happiness. That would imply that just by existing someone has earned the right to be happy. We have the right to pursue happiness, but we have to achieve it in our own lives.

Are emotional dispositions something that are innately determined or do we have the power to change them?     

Moral Status

Humans are the only beings that appear to be capable of debating moral status. This makes us moral agents because we are the ones that decide who or what has moral status and how much they have. Because animals cannot determine their moral status or that of other beings we refer to them as moral patients. Moral patients have certain rights that are determined based on their needs. This means that people should not base moral decisions on their own wants. For example, if I like the taste of chicken that does not mean that I need chicken or that this want trumps the need of that animal for survival. Basic protection of needs include preventing unnecessary suffering and death. Since certain humans become vegetarians, vegans, animal rights activists, etc, we know humans are capable of respecting the needs of non-humans. An overwhelming number of people do eat meat, though. This could lead to the belief that it is part of human nature to eat meat. We could also say that it is human nature to watch television because a majority of people do so. Yet people have only had television in recent years and most people would be reluctant to say it was our nature. It does not follow that one is in our nature because most people now do so and the other is not. Especially since evidence suggests that people developed without the instinct or biology that would incline them towards meat. People do not look at a living animal and crave its meat, we do not see road kill and feel hungry and we do not seem instinctually inclined to chase after animals like we see most cats and dogs do. We also have a long intestine that allows meat to rot inside of us, relatively small canine teeth, and hands that are better developed for picking berries than rending flesh. These facts would incline one to feel that harming animals was not a matter of survival for humans, as it is with many animals, except in times of extreme need. This would mean harming moral patients like non-humans is not something people ought to do in a situation where they do not risk starvation.

Animals are not the only moral patients. Children are another example. They are not capable of making reasoned decisions for themselves so their parents become guardians that make decisions for them. This is a natural delineation of moral status between adults, who make their own decisions that we must respect, and children who have decisions made for them. We do not even think about doing this and most people would not question that it is a good practice. This determination of moral status is probably part of our nature.

We would all agree that a crushing a potato chip is not wrong because it is inanimate and cannot care about that and certainly we would not say the same of a human, a child, or most animals (with the exception of insects and spiders in many people’s cases). This might lead one to believe that we do not naturally assign moral status to inanimate objects, but this is not necessarily true. An exception would be something like a gravestone. Destroying a gravestone would likely be seen as an affront upon the person, or the family of the person the grave is dedicated to. This means that objects can have moral status, but only in relation to people.

Could an object have moral status that is not related to the emotional connection that humans feel?