As the professor said about the blog being wide open, I think that Hobbes theory about morality is also wide open.  He says that anything that goes against the social contract is immoral and anything that doesn’t is moral.  I think that he leaves to much  to be thought of as moral.  Take a world like ours, there is no moral value to doing your chores and getting the little things done all day.  In society like Hobbes’ it would be considered moral to do your chores because it doesn’t go against the social contract theory.

Hobbes observations about the equality of men’s abilities are correct.  I agree with him because it is true that no one man is better than another and if there was one that showed a better ability, then the one man with the less ability would be able to team up with other men to take him down.  This leads me to Hobbes second observation that all men have the same likelihood of getting what they want.  The third observation is one in which says that the goods in life are scarce.  I agree with this also because the goods that are produced by the natural goods in life are scarce.  If you think about oil and coal that run factories, you would see that in fact we on earth have a limited amount of these natural resources and therefore have a limited amount of goods on earth.

When Hobbes makes his fourth observation he says that the state of man is war with one another.  When you think about the state of nature you have to block out all of government and laws.  It helped me to think about sitting in history class learning about the times before the US even existed because during that time period it was in fact a state of nature in North America.  Man was at war with one another and would try and build and blockade themselves from all other man.  I think that this is one of the reasons why people back then started to move westward; it shows that people wanted to protect themselves by moving farther away from other societies.

According to Kant, it is immoral to neglect our natural talents because it cannot be willed into universal law.  Kant believes that no rational human being would be able to comply with this because our natural talents serve us for all different reasons.  He thinks that our rationality and the maxim, if you want to neglect your talents then be lazy, cannot be a part of the same human nature.  Kant uses our rationality to try and make this a convincing argument, but I think that it depends on the interpretation of rationality in order to believe his argument.  His interpretation of rationality is one that consists of the necessary willing that all of the talents be developed.  I think that he believes that rationality is the ability to reason and choose what is best for you.  People in reality though, don’t always know what is best for them self and therefore depend on others to help them.  I am not convinced by his argument because I think that if the maxim were a universal law there would still be people who aren’t lazy and those people would develop their talents to the fullest extent.  I don’t think that a place like this if far from what we live in today.

When Kant talks about committing suicide he uses the categorical imperative to decide whether or not it is a moral act. The premise that he uses is one in which if someone felt so sick of life that they thought if they were to continue living the way they were it would be better to kill them self and end there pain; then would it be contradicting to their duty. The maxim that Kant uses is, from self-love I make it my principle to shorten my life when its longer duration threatens more troubles than it promises agreeableness. Now to make this into a maxim that we can use, If you feel only pain in your life and no happiness, kill yourself. The next step in the theory is to image a place where this is a universal law. Once you can picture this place you will see that this a place were self-love is contradicting because it is telling you to do everything that you can to live as long as you can and when you have a slight bump in the rode it says kill yourself. This can’t be a place that exists because it is not in our nature for self-love to tell us two contradicting things. Therefore, The maxim doesn’t work and we have a duty not to kill ourselves.

Kant’s categorical imperative strengthens our duty not to tell lies because the categorical imperative states that we should “act only such that you could will our maxim into universal law,” which means that we have the duty not to lie because we couldn’t will the act of lying into universal law.  In other words, if we were able to lie because it was a universal law, then all of the truth in the world would break down because you wouldn’t know if the person was lying or telling the truth.  Another problem is that no one would give to others because you wouldn’t believe the other person when asked to do something.  You wouldn’t believe other people because everyone in the world would have the reflex to lie when put in the position were they needed something from someone else.  For example, image yourself in a place were everyone in the world would lie when they needed something.  Now my lawn needs to be cut and because I don’t have any time I ask you to cut it and in return I will pay you fifty dollars. Your answer to this would be no way because you know that I would never pay you the money and I only asked because I have no time.  This example shows how lying is immoral and how we have the duty not to lie because if everyone were to follow the act of lying, then the promises and truth in the world would be no more.

Kant and Utilitarianism are two opposite theories of the nature of morality. Utilitarianism is about the increase of overall happiness, which refers to the outcome of an action. They are usually referred to as consequentialists because they look at the the consequences of a proposed action to determine the decision and its morality. Kant on the other hand looks at the will of a person to determine the nature of morality. By will he is talking about the feeling that a person has about the action right before the action takes place and right after his/her intentions. It is the chemical reactions that take place in the brain that cause the action to occur. You can think of it like this, Picture yourself standing at the foul line preparing to shoot a free throw. Your intentions are to make the basket and score a point, the action is releasing the ball from your hands and pushing it toward the basket, the will is the brain signal that shoots through your body that causes you to say “now is the best time to sink the shot” and makes you start the shot. Kant would say that your action would be moral because you made it out of good will. The utilitarian would say that if you made the basket it was moral because it would give you another point and make you one step closer to winning the game, which would increase overall happiness, and if you didn’t then it would be immoral.

The objectors say that Utilitarianism is asking too much because it is unreasonable to ask that people think and act out of the motivation of overall happiness. Mill’s response to this is that he is not asking people to think about overall happiness while making decisions, he is only telling them to do things to increase overall happiness. The example of the two people that donate to charity and that one is only doing it to get a tax cut is a good example for this because it shows that the one person is only doing it for the selfish reason of receiving in return a tax benefit and not to increase overall happiness. This proves the objectors wrong, and shows that people can have other reasons for doing things and still increase overall happiness in the end. Even though the person getting the tax cut is increasing overall happiness on a greater scale because he is also making himself happier, the other person is just as happy because he just donated to charity. I believe that is acting out of the knowledge of helping others and not himself.

A group of objectors who are trying to go against Mill have said that people don’t have enough time to decide what would gain overall happiness.  I think that this is a semi-reasonable objection because it is true that one cannot possibly have the time to decide something that would impact so many people.  I mean the line of people would pretty much be infamous.  Mill on the other hand replies to the objectors with the fact that people generalize the past experiences that people have had and use that to make a decision.  Although he says it in much better words I agree with him.  He is saying that when people need to make quick decisions they act on the basis of the consequences that they have seen in the past.  They wager the consequences and do what is morally right, which in most cases will increase overall happiness.  When you are in the heat of the moment it is not the first time that any one person has experienced that moment, people have lived it and dealt with it before, and that is what you make your decisions off of.

I think that this objection is insane because people do not go through life learning nothing.  They learn from there actions, suffer the consequences if any, and become one step closer to moral excellence.   There has been so many centuries of life passed down for hundreds of years and people are taught the many decisions that are moral and have to be made in seconds.

Take doctors for example, they make spur of the moment decisions every day.  They are taught in school how to save a life and to do and use whatever means necessary.  Doctors are taught how to produce overall happiness because if a man/woman is on there table they must do whatever they can to help him/her, which in return will produce happiness for his/her family and him/her self.

The objectors to Utilitarianism first say that happiness cannot be the purpose of human life and action because it is unattainable, impossible to achieve. They extend this argument with a question “What right hast thou to be happy?, which they are trying to say, we the people have no right to be happy, so how is happiness going to be the basis of human life and action. The next argument they make against Mill states that humans can do without happiness because all the noble beings have felt happiness and didn’t become noble through being happy, but by learning the lesson of renunciation; abandoning or sacrificing. And through this lesson they state that they are the beginning of all virtue. In other words, the second argument is trying to say that noble beings have felt happiness and have abandoned it, and through abandoning it they are considered to be the condition of moral excellence.

The objectors in this case try to disagree with Utilitarianism because they try to contradict it with all of the white lies that people tell. Mill comes back and says that the white lies are only used for a temporary purpose and in a whole are really hurting the truthfulness of society.

I agree with Mill because there is no point in telling a white lie to only tell the truth in the future. The example used in class of not going on the date with the smelly girl will only get you so far because one day you are going to have to say something about her bad BO. You can not live life telling lie after lie. What happens the next time she asks you out? You can sense when someone is telling you a lie just to get out of something and after a while you are going to look at that person differently. In fact, I think that you would stop talking to that person because you wouldn’t be able to trust them with anything else. If you have ever had your trust really broken it is so hard to give that back, and not just to the person that broke it, but to everyone you associate with.