I think that there are many good points that suggest determinism is a strong philosophical view to believe in, however, I think a flaw exists for determinism that makes indeterminism more plausible. Determinism suggests that if a person knew everything, they could predict your entire life and the future surrounding you. I do not think this is possible. I cannot see how one person would ever be able to know everything about a person and their past to be able to fully understand and even predict the future of that person. I also think that natural disasters and chance events that are seen as completely unpredictable cannot be a logical factor for determinism. These chance events can completely alter a person’s life and I do not know how a person could accurately predict that this chance event would happen and how it would affect the future of that person. This is mainly why I cannot find determinism to be completely plausible and therefore believe that indeterminism is the more reasonable view. Also, I think indeterminism plays a significant role in free will and I thought Kane had a very strong argument for free will with his newfound idea of self-forming actions, which further support the view of indeterminism.

Free will can be defined as the capacity unique to persons that allows us to control our actions. To many philosophers, free will is one of the most difficult questions to answer in metaphysics. Many people who are not involved in answering these questions wonder why people bother pondering or even caring them at all and the main reason is related to free action and moral responsibility. The example that the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy uses to explain free action is ” a woman owns a dog and does not want to walk the dog but knows the dog needs exercise. Even though she really does not want to walk the dog in the cold, she decides that the best decision is to walk the dog.” This is free action; the woman must decide if she is going to walk the dog before she actually walks him.  If human actions result from the rational capacities of humans, shown in this example, then we see that free action depends on free will – “to say that an agent acted freely is minimally to say that the agent was successful in carrying out a free volition or choice” (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy). In regards to the relationship between free will and moral responsibility, if an agent does not have free will then the agent is not morally responsible for his/her actions. If a person was forced to steal a car, that person is not morally responsible because it was not an action of free will. The importance of free will is more easily described when relating it to free action and moral responsibility, because the importance becomes more significant.

Even though functionalism was not my assigned definition, I enjoyed listening and discussing the viewpoint of functionalists and whether or not this was a good theory of consciousness to believe in. I believe functionalism is a better alternative to behaviorism and the identity theory because it encompasses some aspects of both. Functionalists believe that purely the functional roles control the different mental states. This includes the behavioral side of mental states as well as the physical side, such as neural activity and physiological sensations. Some may be able to criticize that the nature of consciousness is not functional even though it may have functional characteristics. This includes the idea that people exist in the world without a conscious, even though this is a controversial idea. I think consciousness is mainly what makes a living, breathing, functioning human being a person. I do not think that there are humans that exist without a consciousness, and even if these such humans did exist, I do not think they would be considered “people”. They may act and behave the way we do, but that missing piece of human consciousness would keep them from understanding what ‘normal’ people (conscious people) feel and believe.

I found this article and thought it was helpful for relating the class discussion to recent news in the court system regarding same sex marriage. I liked how this article specifically showed what states have legalized same sex marriage, what states have struck down gay marriage bans (making the legalization of gay marriage in these states more promising), and where gay marriage bans are still upheld. This article discusses the future of gay marriage legalization in these states a lot, and I think that once the case goes to the Supreme Court, which will happen sooner or later, I think that gay marriage will be officially legalized. Since the majority of the US has legalized gay marriage, the acceptance of gay marriage has increased greatly in the past decade. I can easily see this trend continuing to rise in the future and seeing these marriage bans in the four states being declared unconstitutional. The article link is copied below for anyone who wants to read more about it!

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/07/us/appeals-court-upholds-same-sex-marriage-ban.html?_r=0

Imagining a world shared with zombies is difficult, but since I’m a Walking Dead fan, it’s more imaginable. If zombies acted exactly like they acted in the Walking Dead, where they are lifeless bodies looking for humans (and animals) to feed on, then I do not think they would have any rights. They would be worth nothing to society and their “lives” should not be comparable to a live human or animal’s life. I think that seeing a loved one turn into a zombie would be devastating, but they would not be human anymore, so they would not have any value. Looking at Singer’s argument, zombies are not conscious, cannot reason, and do not have any morals. You cannot train a zombie like you can a dog or cat. This shows that animals have a much higher level of thinking and can be much more easily controlled and helpful to people overall. Since zombies cannot think and do not benefit society in any way, how are they useful? Maybe if zombies were not as harmful to society we could find an ethical way to treat them, but the most sensible way to treat them if they existed would be how they do in the Walking Dead – by killing them in their tracks before they can “add to the fire” and turn more people into zombies.

According to the principle of utilitarianisn, our one moral duty is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. An objection to this idea is that there is more to life than pleasure; knowledge and virtue are important among many other things. A response to this would be that utilitarianisn requires that we consider everyone’s pleasure and not just our own. There is more to life than just physical pleasure and that many people could even say that they find pleasure from acquiring knowledge and some other things people do not view as physically pleasurable (pleasure is relative). Another objection would be that just because something makes people happy does not make it right. It is wrong to harm individuals in order to make others happy. The example used in class was if five people each needed a certain organ and one healthy person could supply all five of those organs – it seems beneficial to kill one person to save five, right? A response could be that the person could willingly sacrifice him/herself to help these five people live, since he’s saving more people than he might be worth. If all lives are equal then you are saving four lives.

I agree with some of what Nagel was saying in Chapter 10: The Meaning of Life. His main claim was that life is absurd and meaningless and believing in a God to give life meaning does not make sense. Nagel explains that we view our lives from an objective and subjective perspective. Using the objective perspective, we cannot justify why our life actually matters, so we feel that nothing matters. In the subjective perspective, life seems important and valuable to oneself and other people. Since there is a conflict in the two ways we view our lives, Nagel simply deems our lives absurd.

He says our lives are meaningless because we cannot feel meaningful if our lives are absurd. Using his arguments, I believe that yes, our lives could be meaningless, but it doesn’t matter if we feel happy in the projects we commit ourselves to (which is the main idea of Wolf’s argument). If we feel like we are working towards something that is important and we are important to other people, then we will feel meaningful even if when looking at the “bigger picture” it doesn’t matter.

The advantages of cultural relativism is that it is a very tolerant view and fits well with how cultures change, since cultures are constantly developing as our world continues to develop. I think even though cultural relativism is easily seen as a positive outlook and a perspective that is appreciated when regarding other cultures, there are cons associated with this outlook. First of all, I think cultural relativism is self-contradictory. where cultural relativism makes it so that more than one culture is “right”, but saying there are no objective truths seems like an objective truth is actually being made. Also, moral action would not be possible since everything is tolerated, so the reformers, like Martin Luther King, Jr and Jesus, must be wrong since they went against the pre-existing moral values of society. Speaking of a society, how would that be created with no concrete basis of morals, since all morals would be tolerated?

I think the difference between humanism and self-interest based on Craig and Kurtz’s debate is that Craig believes that human is more than self-interest whereas Kurtz thinks that altruism is based on evolutionary conditions and environment and that looking out for yourself as a person is rational as an athiest. Kurtz does not think there is a basis for the altruistic view when regarding athiesm. Also, another aspect of this debate involved the discussion of rape. Why is rape wrong? Kurtz believes that rape is wrong because it violates the human conscious and that rape inevitably involves negative consequences humans try to avoid so they can be moral beings. Kurtz thinks rape would be wrong even if God did not say it was wrong, but Craig does not see any basis for why Kurtz believe this. Craig thinks that humanism involves the right ethics but that Kurtz hasn’t been able to show that there is goodness without God. In this case, even though Craig doesn’t think Kurtz adequately shows goodness without God, I believe that rape is wrong even if God didn’t believe so. Athiests and thiests both believe rape is wrong, because many people see the bad consequences associated with rape and the negative impact it has on morality and the culture of a society.

The Euthyphro dilemma raises the question, “Are acts that are considered morally good willed by God because they are morally good?”, or, “Are these acts morally good because because they are willed by God?” The Divine Command Theory is seen to be refuted by this dilemma mainly because of the premise that one of these cases has to be correct. The problem is if that if acts considered morally good are that way because they are good by nature, then these acts are independent of God. This means that these morally good acts would not need a God to determine them as good, and if God commanded certain things to be good, then whatever is good would be considered arbitrary, meaning that murder could have been considered good when God was deciding what is good and what is not. Since good being arbitrary does not seem like a plausible case, I consider the Divine Command Theory to be false unless there was another expanation besides the two mentioned at the beginning of this post.