Morality and "Spectacles"

#10- Rachel Alexander
Final- Post 1
11/13/17

What is morally right? How do you decide what is morally right? Do we all have the same moral principles? My personal philosophy on what is morally right formed through the ideas held by Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, and Arthur Schopenhauer. I believe that we all have a few basic, shared moral principles, but when we have on our “spectacles” (which is all the time) we have additional, differing moral principles that affect how we see the world and react to it. These spectacles also make it hard for us to relate to one another on the same level because we are experiencing things differently and holding different ideas and beliefs.

            Immanuel Kant believes that your emotions, and specifically sympathy, should play absolutely no part in your moral actions. If you help someone because you feel sympathy for them, Kant held that you should not have even helped them in the first place because you were not following a moral compass. A moral compass, to Kant, was a guide that every person followed because they knew it was the right thing to do, not because they let their sympathy guide them. The example given to us in A Little History of Philosophy, was that if a person is disgusted with another and has no interest in helping them but they do it anyway because they know it is the right thing to- this person is more morally right than a person who helps out of sympathy. Kant also really, really believed that lying is never morally right; it is one of the worst things to do.

            Jeremy Bentham developed the Greatest Happiness Principle which is the idea that whatever results in the most happiness is the right thing to do. For example, if you have to decide between something that will result in a greater happiness or remaining truthful (not telling a lie), you choose the thing that will give you greater happiness. So, when faced with the instance the book gives us, a murderer is after your friend and she comes to your house to hide, Kant would have said it is morally wrong to lie in any circumstance and disclosed the location of his friend to the murderer. Bentham would have told the lie to save his friend’s life because her life is a greater happiness than not lying. It is almost like placing two things that are morally right on a scale, and choosing to act on whichever one weighs heaviest because it is the action of greater morality and it will give you a greater happiness.

            Arthur Schopenhauer had a foundation for his concept of morality: harming others. His morality was built upon compassion; he cared what happened to others because if he is inflicting pain upon another, he is ultimately inflicting pain upon himself. How is he hurting himself by hurting others? He believed that we are all a part of one, whole, big thing- the World as Will. This simply means we are all a piece of one big energy force and that we are all connected; since we are all connected, when we harm others we are harming ourselves. So, when you are choosing what is more morally right, telling the truth or saving your friend by lying, you save your friend and tell the lie because this is the moral action that will hurt neither of you.

            In my second installment, I will continue to discuss how these three pieces came to form my own personal philosophy, how our spectacles affect our morality, how we see the world, how we react to the world, and post discussion questions. 

Sources: A Little History of Philosophy