The Distance Between Morality and Luck Essay

Human factors are involved wildly in human behaviors and various social systems, including social laws and religion doctrines. Just like what I mentioned previously, scientists believe that the human life is pre-determined and human’s behavior is inevitable. They consider that if someone has all the information of one person, he or she may get to know how he or she is going to change in advance. But from the point of view throughout the history of human society people often turn to emphasize personal responsibility. Law and legal penalties for criminals act based entirely on the idea of individual “free will”. Most Jewish and Christian also believed that individuals should be responsible for the crime and suspects should be punished. We can imagine a psychology professor who believes determinism would say to a student: "You have to concentrate to your study, otherwise you will get nothing!" You can see the contradiction of human behaviors from this typical and ironic statement above, and notice that there exists a deviation between theoretical knowledge and actual human behaviors.

Hobbes and Kant both give a different account of the foundations of morality. Drawing from Hobbes’ Leviathan and Kant’s Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, I will compare their understanding of the foundations of morality. I will discuss the conflicting accounts of the role played by reason versus the role played by desire and inclination in the determination of what is good, evil, right or wrong. Hobbes claims that ordinary experiences establish human beings as self-interested and are driven by desire or aversion and that is why morality is grounded by subjective self-interests. On the other hand, Kant provides a purely rational principle for ordinary views about unconditional moral value, morality has a universal law that applies to all rational beings at all times. The following paper will identify and explain the key points and sources of difference between Hobbes and Kant. First, I will explain both understandings of morality. Second, I will describe how the account of the foundations of morality differs in human nature, rationality and conceptions of morality. I will, in conclusion, argue that Hobbes’ account of morality best works with our ordinary experiences and moral convictions.

According to the definition of the Moral Compass text, moral compass is the reflective, international adoption of values and behaviors as a framework for realizing the good in oneself, in others, and in the social and material environment. My own moral compass is constructed mainly by my parents and the eastern social values and principles of relationships, which are largely influenced by the thoughts and ideas of Buddhism, Taoism and the Confucianism. Among them, Confucianism affects my country’s social values and furthermore my parents and my moral compass the most. In the contrast of Western culture, Confucianism puts a huge emphasis on the relationships between individuals in family, school,

Throughout this paper, I will contrast and compare two moral theories in attempt to uncover what one provides a better argument and can be applied as a universal moral code. The two moral theorists Immanuel Kant and J.S Mill have created two distinctly different theories on morality and how to develop a universal moral code. Both theories focus on intentions and consequences. Kant believes that the intentions and reasons of our actions can be measured and defined as morally correct, where as Mill believes that our intentions really play no role in morality, and that we should focus on the consequences and outcomes of our actions to evoke the most happiness for the most people. Even though both philosophers make incredibly different

The belief that morality requires God remains a widely held moral maxim. In particular, it serves as the basic assumption of the Christian fundamentalist's social theory. Fundamentalists claim that all of society's troubles - everything from AIDS to out-of-wedlock pregnancies - are the result of a breakdown in morality and that this breakdown is due to a decline in the belief of God. This paper will look at different examples of how a god could be a bad thing and show that humans can create rules and morals all on their own. It will also touch upon the fact that doing good for the wrong reasons can also be a bad thing for the person.

Nagel identifies four types of luck: constitutive, circumstantial, causal, and resultant. He identifies these phenomena to support his claim that almost all our actions are contingent on luck, but that moral judgments are made nonetheless.

I infer several conclusions from Smith’s definition and analysis of sympathy. First, sympathy is a mode of perception. The “eye of the mind” or the imagination perceives the situation witch elicits primary sentiments and secondary agreeable or disagreeable sentiments which are the basis of moral judgement. Secondly, I conclude from Smith’s propositions that the mind is a passive recipient, therefore moral knowledge is a by-product of external stimuli. In other words our external sense stimuli provoke a change in our minds, from which our imaginations produce sentiments by which we judge the propriety or merit of another’s conduct.

The case of moral luck was introduced by Williams Bernard and developed by Thomas Nagel in their articles respectively. Both raised the question whether luck can influence the judgment of morality. In this essay, the definition of moral luck and four kinds of moral luck by Williams and Nagel will be discussed through several case examples, and then followed with some arguments from Judith Andre, Donna Dickenson and David Enoch and Andrei Marmor who disagree with the concept of moral luck.

Nagel identifies four types of luck: constitutive, circumstantial, causal, and resultant. He identifies these phenomena to support his claim that almost all our actions are contingent on luck, but that moral judgments are made nonetheless.

The Origins of Morality: How Nature, Nurture, and Especially Free Will Influence One’s Moral Framework

Nagel examines how a people have a lack of control of the circumstances they are in and the outcomes of their action. Instinctually people like to state that we are not morally responsible for actions outside our control, but Nagel states that all of our desires and circumstances are out of our control, therefore we can not claim people are responsible for their actions. The idea of moral luck is stems from the fact

How luck does matter to one’s actual moral assessment and into the paradox, according to Nagel, can be shown in the example of someone driving and they are talking on the phone, however, another person jumps into the road and the driver hits and kills the person. As seen in the example, the situation was out of the drivers control. They could not control or predict that someone was going to jump into the road, so why should one moral assesses the driver and say they are a bad person for something they cannot control and was not their fault. Nagel combats this and states it is morally bad and morally bad luck because of negligence. Negligence according to Nagel is where one fails to live up to the responsibilities that one has concerning those

Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morality” includes his theory on man’s development of “bad conscience.” Nietzsche believes that when transitioning from a free-roaming individual to a member of a community, man had to suppress his “will to power,” his natural “instinct of freedom”(59). The governing community threatened its members with punishment for violation of its laws, its “morality of customs,” thereby creating a uniform and predictable man (36). With fear of punishment curtailing his behavior, man was no longer allowed the freedom to indulge his every instinct. He turned his aggressive focus inward, became ashamed of his natural animal instincts, judged himself as inherently evil, and developed a bad conscience (46).

One plausible route is to give up on idea on requiring control. Or you could deny there is more luck or deny moral luck is a pervasive as Nagel suggest which corresponds with Kantian perspective. However, you could agree with moral luck but it undermines free will, personal responsibility and ultimately undermines morality as a whole which is a sceptical view. One could further take the consequentialist route as a utilitarian where morality is not based on free will and what we have control over or individual decisions and intension instead morality is just based on what objectively makes things better or worse – what will produce more happiness – if this is the standard it does not matter whether someone intended to do the right thing and all that matters is the consequence that come as a result of that

Moral tales in the middle ages were set up to teach a lesson about how to live life according to the church. During Medieval times most tales were religious based. The end of the Middle Ages were more corrupt coming from the Catholic Church and that was a serious problem and those moral messages came from the bible. There still may be some explanation to bring into play image of class, especially middle-class, well to Chaucer. The middle ages were a time of an era during which social structures and theory were always changing.