Ignorance is Not an Excuse Essays

An omnibenevolent God created a man with the capacity to sin; as Augustine has addressed, the evil in man resides from his will. Augustine, however, does not address how evil stems also from the human nature of temptation that was a consequence of the original fall from Eden. Augustine touches on this theme when accounting for the origins of his sin, but he never fully declares it. “I loved to excuse my soul,” Augustine begins, “and to accuse something else inside me (I knew not what) but which was not I. But, assuredly, it was I, and it was my impiety that had divided me against myself” (62). Here, Augustine admits to denying his own human nature to sin, and blames it on something beyond his will, such as a result of creation. Bonner,

We see and witness things in this world that we hold to be true when what we see is the furthest thing from the truth. Plato wants his audience to understand that there are some in this world who only get a skewed and manipulated view of what is really going on, and it is the job of those who know the truth to share it. We who are educated are to lead those who are ignorant out of the shadows of deception. “It is the task of the enlightened not only to ascend to learning and to see the good but to be willing to descend again to those prisoners and to share their troubles and their honors, whether they are worth having or not. And this they must do, even with the prospect of death”. This quote helps to further explain that those who see things clearly are to share what they know with

St. Augustine’s On Free Choice of the Will elaborates on the relationship between God, free will, and evil. During the very beginning of Book One, he asks the question, “isn’t God the cause of evil” (Cahn 357). From this question, it can be ascertained that he searches for a connection between God and evil (sins), which inferred in the writing to be connected though free will. He believes that God does not create evil, but rather that evil is simply the lack of good, since God is completely good and, therefore, cannot create evil. God not being the source of evil is then further elaborated through his explanation of a crime and how it is caused by inordinate desires and human abuse of good things (Cahn 360). By explaining

“Allegory of the Cave” is a renowned piece that has affected many opinions throughout the span of history. The purpose of this complex piece was to persuade philosophers of his views on the importance of education. Plato states many opinions about how education however he doesn’t back the opinions up with supporting facts. Plato lacks supporting facts in this essay, however his abundance of intelligence helps persuade the audience to consider his theories. Plato claims that knowledge gained through perception is all opinionated and to have real knowledge we must go through reasoning. He believed that the truth could only be seen through the eyes of an educated and non-materialistic philosopher. Plato wanted his fellow philosophers to see that

Augustine sates there are three general kinds of sin, those of the flesh, mind, and will. He reaffirms this saying “I sinned because I disobeyed them not in order to choose something more worthwhile, but simply because I loved games. I hankered to win myself glory in out contests, and to have my ears tickled by tall stories, which only made them itch more hotly; and all the while that same curiosity more and more inflamed my eyes with the list for the public shows which are the games of grownups (Augustine, 1,16).” Augustine is saying we commit these forms of sin, not because we are finding something more worthwhile, but because of our human nature. We sin because we love the feeling we get when we do something wrong. Even though we can will ourselves to do good and not sin, it is in our very nature to do wrong every since the fall. In Himes “Ancient Israel’s response to the dilemma is that evil does not come from God; it comes from us when we reject ourselves and refuse to accept the goodness of our own being (Himes, 31)” Himes uses the word evil instead of sin, however both are synonymous, in religion. Ancient Israel relies that sin is part of our nature and something we will have to deal with even though it is wrong.

Augustine: Why yes I do, for it is a will by which we seek to live a good and upright life and to attain unto perfect wisdom.

With this settled upon as the relationship between good and evil, God proceeded to create man with a will primed towards obedience. He “supplied [man] with an abundance of all things…and had not burdened him with a large number of oppressive and difficult precepts, but…had given him one very brief and easy commandment to keep him in wholesome obedience” (XIV, 15). Man is from the beginning not created to seek knowledge through reason, as philosophy is a “burden” to him in Paradise. Augustine does not take the modern view that the fall was caused by the fatal flaw of curiosity in man, but rather, it is through a the irrational passion of pride like the pride of Satan—“with an ambition like that of a tyrant, he wished rather to gloat over subjects than be a subject himself”—that Adam and Eve are compelled to eat the forbidden fruit (XIV, 11). Reason is thus given no role in the story of Eden—it is a battle between self-will and God’s will, with self-will aligning with vice as its cause in man, and God’s will on the side of nature as its cause.

He believes that everyone has the option to make a decision about something. He says that free will is the ability in human beings to act otherwise and there is a connection between being able to act otherwise and the notion that some acts are never ok to do. Moral absolutes can also be found in Christian tradition with St. Augustine. St. Augustine discussed the topic of lying and lying, as most people know, is considered to be intrinsically evil. However, he believes that there are some instances in which lying is necessary because, sometimes, it brings about good

Plato: People need to be enlightened. People may be claiming that they are enlightened but in reality, they are not. Even some of the most educated individuals are in total darkness. The reason why educated individuals are not necessarily enlightened is that education system is all about forcing concepts into the minds of the students and expecting them to believe it, memorize it and pass exams. Educational system does not allow cultivation of inner freedom. Inner freedom is what give someone an inner sight. Inner freedom enables the person to see things the way they are and not the way the books or society or peers expects one to see

Firstly, Plato introduces the important concept that it is far worse for one to do wrong than to suffer wrongdoing. Socrates, refusing to be harmed by Meletus, believes that “it is not allowed that a good man be injured by a worse” (pg. 41). Despite Socrates' impending death or banishment, he does not think that these are the worst possible situations and still goes on to say that “it is a much greater evil to do what [Meletus] is doing now, and to try to put a man to death unjustly” (pg. 41). Certainly

The cause of evil itself, according to Augustine, is the human will, and thus all blame for it rests on our shoulders, not on Gods. We willfully turn our souls away from God when we perform evil deeds. Even the punishment that God imposes on us for our evil is something that we brought on ourselves. Consequently, a first solution that Augustine offers to the problem of evil is that human will is the cause of evil and reason for divine punishment. A second and related solution is that the evil we willfully create within our souls is only a deprivation of goodness. Think of God’s goodness like a bright white light; the evil that we humans create is like an act of dimming that light, or shielding ourselves from it to create an area of darkness. It is not like we’ve created a competing light source of our own, such as a bright red light that we shine around to combat God’s bright white light. Accordingly, the evil that we create through our wills is the absence of good, and not a substantive evil in itself.

Plato starts with the analogy of the sun, which points out the contrast between the visible and the intelligible worlds. Within the visible world man has eyes and objects to be seen, but man needs another object for the eyes to see the object. This object is the sun, which provides the light that is required by the eye to view the visible world. In correspondence, the Form of the Good in the intelligible world is equal to the sun by the way that the Good allows the forms to be known. Plato specifically states, “What gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower is the Form of the Good. And though it is the cause of knowledge and truth, it is also an object of knowledge” (508e). Along with

He writes, “when turned towards the twilight of becoming and perishing, then [the soul] has opinion only, and goes blinking about, and seems to have no intelligence” (Book VI, p. 25). By establishing opinion as the opposite to the ultimate good, and by definition, the ultimate evil, he criticizes the use of rhetoric and persuasion while praising to his long-winded, circuitous form of writing. By continually asking questions and telling parables, Plato avoids direct advocation of his beliefs and allows his readers to discover the truth for themselves, rather than to be coerced through eloquent language.

However, most of these paradoxes are due to the evolution of Plato’s ideas. Plato’s earlier dialogues seem to place too much value on the pure rationality of man, while later dialogues show an acknowledgment of man’s basal needs influencing his morality (455). By focusing on Plato’s later works regarding ethics it becomes far more possible to find interpretations that have academic consensus. In Plato’s Republic, a collection of works exploring the nature of virtue, one sees a teleological axiom: “The good is that which all soul pursues and for the sake of which it does everything” (Parry, 241). It is important to note that Plato has a specific idea in mind when he writes of the good. For Plato the good is the inherent trait that makes all good things good (243). With these two premises Parry is able to conclude: “That which all soul pursues and for the sake of which it does everything is the good itself, the reality of goodness, and not any visible good” (244). According to Plato, when the soul does everything for the sake of the good the soul is acting virtuously, as the good is all that is good, including all of virtue (249). Furthermore, since the good is a teleological state, the admiration of the good is what humans should strive for. And only by recognizing the good can humans admire it (250). Therefore, when humans obtain the knowledge to recognize the good and admire it for itself can humans do everything for the sake of the good, thereby

I will first examine Plato’s ethics. Plato was a philosopher who was both a rationalist and absolutist. According to his view, people must be schooled to acquire certain kinds of knowledge i.e. mathematics, philosophy and so forth. This training will give them the capacity to know the nature of the good life. Since, evil is due to lack of knowledge.