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Socrates Morality

Decent Essays

This chapter focuses on what morality is. Socrates defines it as “how we out to live” and why. However, there are many rival theories against the Socrates’ idea. In fact, it is hard to define morality. So in this chapter, the authors utilize three real examples which are about handicapped children: baby Theresa, conjoined twin Jodie and Many, and Tracy Latimer. For the case of Theresa, Theresa had anencephaly when she was born, thus Theresa did not have the ability to breathe and beat her heart, and was going to die within days. Additionally, she is not conscious. So, her parents wanted to donate her organ to other children because they thought that it benefits someone without harming Theresa. However, it did not happen due to the law. For …show more content…

Since it would cause Mary’s death, their parents reject the surgery, otherwise, the surgery was performed by the court’s permission. As the doctor expected, Jodie lived and Mary died. In the other example, Tracy (whose mental level was like a three months baby) was killed by her father because he thought that planed surgery is really hard for Tracy, and she was suffering without hope of relief. In fact, her mother, who did not want the father to kill Tracy, was relieved to find Tracy dead when she came back home. Even though he received a lenient sentence from the trial court, he was sentenced from the Canadian Supreme Court to 10 years in prison. The main point of the first two examples is whether people can kill someone for someone’s benefit or not. Furthermore, the last example gives us the idea of impartiality. These examples are contested and controversial issues. Thus, we need better moral reasoning in order to conclude ethical issues, and there are two things to build exceptional moral reasoning. The first thing is to get one’s fact straight because moral judgments are different from one’s

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