Human Freedom, Consciousness, And Reality

The freedom to hold beliefs of one's choosing and to change them is central to human development. It is the individual's search for meaning and the desire to know who we are as human beings that distinguish the human conscience. Human Development Reports have evolved dramatically from a purely materialist approach centered on wealth and income to embrace the concept of development as the expansion of human freedoms.

“This is the main reason why targeted boycotts of the products of child labor turn out to be counterproductive (at least in the short term): they focus, in a limited geographical area, only on the effects of child labor—its products—but typically fail to investigate the structural reasons for the occurrence of child labor—namely, poverty.”

Shad Helmstetter once said, “Choosing to live your life by your own choice is the greatest freedom you will ever have.” It is important that people are able to choose the paths of their own lives. As the quote suggests, the ultimate freedom is choice. Nonetheless, many people are denied this ultimate freedom. In relation to Afghanistan, many women are denied the ability to choose the course of their lives. The oppression of women in Khaled Hosseini’s, A Thousand Splendid Suns, subjects them to total control by men, however, when the prominent woman characters in the novel, such as Mariam and Laila, are able to maintain a sense of control, they pave the paths of their own lives.

“I am self-propelled; fueled from within. I appreciate people’s opinions, but I am not attached to them. I learned a long time ago that if I give them the power to feed me, I also give them the power to starve me.” -Dr. Steve Maraboli. When I read this quote I thought he was describing that no one can hold him back and he is going to be free. My question is what does it mean to be free? Does it mean not caring what others think about you? Or is it being free to accomplish your dreams with no regrets and nothing holding you back? Being free means different things to different people. In the poem “Caged Bird,” by Maya Angelou, she talks about two types of people one being caged and one being free. In his poem “Mother to Son,” Langston Hughes talks about there will bumps in the road of life, but you have to forge your path to be free. In the poem, “The Road Not Taken,” Robert Frost discusses the two roads a person can take, either you can be free and not care about other's opinions, or you can be trapped by everyone’s thoughts about you. You can be free by not caring about others opinion’s on you, but by making your own path. So will you choose to be free or will you choose to be dragged down by other’s opinions about you?

It is estimated that one in six of the world’s children are working in unacceptable conditions and that's about 180 million children worldwide (Kilcullen 218). That is a great deal of children that are exposed to harm or exploitation. The opposing side believes that these poor countries need child labor to survive, that it is alright to pay children low wages for the work they do, and do not believe that schooling is as important as work. By regulating child labor laws, governments would be able to enforce safer working conditions, increase wages to meet the cost of living, and mandate education for better opportunities even though the opposing side disputes these reasons and stance.

One of the ways an individual can understand cultural diversity is by creating a meaningful and genuine relationships with people who are from different cultures. Cultural diversity is an important phenomenal for teachers in training to become familiar with and I believe it is for this reason that the Education Department at Medgar Evers College has as one of its eight-unit standard Personal and Global Consciousness. The department under this standard expects teachers in training to examine, deconstruct, and reconstruct their own and others beliefs, values and perspective, to understand their own cultures, and to develop empathy and acceptance towards others culture. Teachers wishing to work in New York City

“A soul-searching debate is now coursing through the country: Child labor is universally condemned, but is it fair to multinationals to cut and run when incidents arise of children working?” writes David Montero in his article titled “Is Doing the Right Thing Wrong?” While child labor in the United States (U.S.) is not accepted, it still runs rampant in second and third world countries, which is why children often find their way into factories. When this happens people often boycott the companies where this is found, but boycotting is not the way to go. Just boycotting companies doesn’t do anything, and can often hurt the very children people are trying to help. Then there’s the actual legal workers, boycotting a company for having child labor has negative effects on the legal workers and can often derail needed progress that these second and third world countries desperately need. People often jump to boycott

In “Human Freedom and the Self,” Roderick M. Chisholm takes the libertarian stance, arguing that freedom is incompatible with determinism, that determinism is in fact false, and that humans do posses the kind of freedom required for moral responsibility. Chisholm argues that a deterministic universe, where all events, including human actions, proceed from prior events without the possibility that they would proceed differently than they do prevent the possibility that humans are responsible for their actions. To validate his libertarian beliefs, Chisholm sets out to prove that humans are responsible for their actions and also the thoughts that lead to those actions. In order to answer this problem, Chisholm believes we must make some assumptions about the man who preforms the act.

When martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed to the world that he had a dream, people stopped and realized it didn’t have to be just a dream. People didn’t just listen to what this leader had to say, they actually heard him, and they understood him. Society today reflects the hundreds of peaceful, or sometimes not so peaceful, protests held by leaders of our past and present that were heard and understood. Without peaceful protest to laws, segregation may still be in America. Same sex marriage may not be legal. Women may not have as many rights as they do now. Freedom today in America, for example, is different than freedom fifty years ago. Freedom today includes all peoples instead of a select few. Resistance to laws brought this free society farther

Abraham Lincoln once said, “Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable – a most sacred right – a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world” (Charters, 2014, Inspiring Quotes, pg. 1). America was founded on the backs of people who had the ability to stand up and fight for freedom and a new found government. There were many aspects that brought the development of American freedom as it exists today. However, American freedom is not what it used to be. “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves,”

In “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person”, Harry Frankfurt illustrates the concepts of freedom of will and freedom of action, but more importantly, Frankfurt has refined the compatibilism theory. Compatibilism allows the freedom of will to exist in the deterministic world. According to determinism theory, the future state of worlds is determined by some events in the distant past (E) and the laws of nature (L). More specifically, E refers to the history, such as experiences or states whereas L refers to scientific or physical law like gravity. For example, an alcoholic’s action is determined that he will not stop drinking. Here E is that he had been drinking in the past, and L is the physiological addiction effect caused by

With detailed reference to the novel, how do you view this in relation to individual freedom?

In the paper, “Human Freedom and the Self” Roderick M. Chisholm offers his theory of human freedom and defends it against a couple objections. One of the objections we will talk about which is the second objection is connected to the concept of immanent causation, where causation is by an agent, he argues how the statement “the prime mover unmoved” (page 391) has been subject to difficulty. Chisholm explains immanent causation as being an agent causing the event A to happen, but although the agent is causing A to happen the agent is not moved by anything. The argument to this objection is that “there must be some event A, which is caused not by any other event but by the agent” (page 391). Well since A was not cause by another event then the agent couldn’t have produced anything either to bring A about, so “what did the agent’s causation consist of” (page 391). Also another point that was made in the objection was the question “what is the difference between A’s just happening and the agents causing A to happen” (page 391). Chisholm responds by saying that there is a difference between man causing A and an event causing A. The two are not the same because transeunt causation is connected to determinism, which makes the train of events, happen and immanent causation as he explains it is when the agent causes the event. He then sums up his answer by saying the reason “lies in the fact that, in the first case but not the second, the event was caused by the man” (pg. 391) He

The use of child labor in developing nations is not a moral issue, it is a cultural one. International corporations should not let the moral argument or current legislation such as the Child Labor Deterrence Act (CLDA) influence how and where they conduct operations. Grounded in what appears as legitimate concern for children, proposed legislation such as the CLDA hinder the potential growth and progress of developing nations by limiting the number of corporations who are willing to set up operations within developing countries. The fallacy with CLDA and similar legislation is that they based on a one-sided moral perspective that inhibits change in developing countries by preventing

For me, I find that there are two different answers to the question: “Are we free within Society?” - and that there are many variations, with thanks to culture, socialization, social interaction and social structure. For the most part I find freedom all around. I'll give some examples of that and show some areas where I see other's struggle with finding a sense of freedom, whether it be external or within.