Paste your essay in here…The following paper will discuss the different visions of moral ethics in philosophy. The order with which each vision will be presented will be chronologically, starting from the oldest vision, Aristotle's, Aquinas, Kant and finally Mill. This is done with purpose to show the reader how time changed the conception of the society regarding ethics, because surely they all were a bit influenced by society.
Aristotle is for sure one of the most famous ancient philosophers, as many visions by him shared are still considered to be modern. The ancient Greek philosopher treated moral philosophy in probably one of his most famous books: Nicomachean Ethics, in which he analyzed how moral responsibility may be given to human-beings. Furthermore, the goal of his book was to analyze the virtues and vices that were involved in moral evolution and how humans could reach the ultimate happiness. The main question of the book was how a human being could live a good life.
He tried to explain the term happiness, which he defined as something that was not reachable through the possession of millions of material goods or intellectual knowledge, because he said that people might be in possession of all these goods and still not be happy. According to him, the most important thing in life was to have virtues, because only through cultivating them true happiness could be obtained. Furthermore, he stated that living with virtues did not mean exhibiting demonstrative knowledge or aesthetic judgments (irrelevant to morality for him), but by behaving in certain ways in given situations.
Aristotle thought that living a life devoted to the research of true happiness, was to live through virtues, more specifically he was convinced that this was all about finding the perfect balance between opposites. More specifically, this meant to find moderation between the two, for example he thought that courage was a perfect balanced mix between rashness and cowardice, generosity between wastefulness and stinginess and so on.
According to the ancient Greek philosopher, human had moral responsibility when they performed actions and therefore, he thought that the virtues of the soul were the result of our own choices, besides in two cases. The first case in which they could not be given responsibilities was when actions were produced by external forces, while the second case when actions were governed by ignorance. Therefore, the philosopher used to accept incontinence, while on the other hand not intemperance. The first term meant being aware what was the right action to perform in a given situation, but because diverted by pleasure acting in a different way. On the other hand to him intemperance meant seeking an excess in pleasure, which he did not accept, because according to him this specific quality could not be cured, while incontinence could be trained and therefore be cured. For that reason, he was convinced that humans were in possession of moral responsibility, because humans are able to either perform or avoid actions. This vision, as later on will be treated in the paper, is also shared by Kant, who lived more than 1000 years later than Aristotle did.
It was also really important to the Greek philosopher to understand the individual and community welfare, which could only happen through a quality that he defined as prudence. This quality helped human beings to understand the nature of things and the connections there is between them. According to him this meant that people were in possession of practical intelligence, which helped people to understand which were the consequences of each action in specific situations. To him it was also really important to perform the best action that helped humans to reach the goal they had set. So, the only way to reach ultimate happiness in his philosophy was through contemplation.
Aristotle considered important also human relationships, which without those people could never consider to be truly alive. According to him there were three different kind of relationships, or friendships: for pleasure, on utility and for good. The first kind in his vision only lasted until the same activity, which created pleasure to both persons, was performed. The second one is similar to the first one, while the last kind of relationship was the one which should last forever. This is because according to him the good was impossible to reach.
Aquinas also studied ethics in his philosophy and in his vision this term meant deciding the best way to live a human life. He believed that humans had to set goals before performing actions, which were simplified thanks to moral activity. The philosopher was a Christian, but although he believed in religion, in order to follow his way of thinking people did not have to accept what was written in the Bible. More specifically his philosophy explained in a deeper way what was not done by the Bible. For example, while the Church thought that the body was the prison of the human's soul, to him the body was a way of expression of it.
His ethical theory was divided into principles and virtues. The first term were the laws of acting, while the second one were qualities considered to be good to possess. This vision is already different from Aristotle's one, who focused more on virtues than on principles, while Aquinas tried thought that the perfect thing was to balance the two of them, in order to live a meaningful life.
While Aristotle considered that it was important to both take in consideration the effects actions performed by individuals had on themselves and the community surrounding them, Aquinas considered that it was more important the impact actions had on the individuals, which should consider more important their own goals compared to the welfare of the community. Furthermore, Aristotle also thought that contemplation was the only quality that could lead people to ultimate happiness, while Aquinas thought that this could only be reached in the afterlife. For this reason, personally I see a contradiction in Aquinas philosophy, because people would have to accept that there is a life after the death, which is a characteristic that only religions share, showing that this philosopher is still strongly related to religion. According to Aquinas, although the ultimate happiness could not be reached in life, there were things that could approach people to it like speech and sex. So, as stated previously in the paper, Aquinas divided ethics into two different qualities: principles and virtues. The first one was a sort of universal law, which could be linked to Kant's way of thinking, which will be discussed later on. This law was that the good should always be pursued and the evil always avoided. Therefore, in his point of view he was convinced that people should always do to others, what they aspect others would do to them. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" was his full statement. This principles are reminded by humans through the conscience, which according to him was the quality owned by humans that governed the choices when performing an action. So, this principle should lead through moral thought six human goods: life, knowledge, friendship, marriage, religion and practical reason. This six qualities stated previously lead, or at least approach humans to the ultimate happiness, which he defined as beatitude. Furthermore, Aquinas was convinced about the fact that human beings all had the capacity to reason, and for that reason were able to share with him what was wrong and what was right. Therefore, like Aristotle, he thought that moral responsibilities could only be addressed when there were no inner or outer impulses influencing them. For example, since he considered that marriage was one of the goods in human lives, that approached them to beatitude, he thought that sex outside marriage was always wrong. To better explain his view, he explained that killing could be considered both good and bad. This was because he thought that a good action was good in its motive, according to the surroundings and objects, while on the other hand bad if one of these characteristics was wrong.
Aquinas recognized 4 types of virtues: prudentia, justice, courage and temperantia. Prudentia to him meant to reasoning rather than passion was at the heart of moral decisions, while justice meant to give others what they were entitled to (which reconnects to his principle). Courage meant to restrain fears so as to act in the right way, while temperantia meant to moderate the desires. As how it can easily be seen, the virtues of Aquinas are really similar to the ones that Aristotle formulated.
Kant as all the philosophers previously cited in this paper shared the view that a good will, or action as defined by the others is good when it is self-contained and not influenced by any external relations. Also, his view about moral theory are pretty similar to the ones formulated by Aquinas, as it was deontological, meaning that they were morally right in virtue of the motives. Therefore, to Kant duty was more important than inclination, meaning that that it is more valuable than acting according to self-interest. The statement formulated by Kant " Duty is the necessity to act out of reverence for the law" sums his view perfectly up. As already stated before, he was convinced that personal interest could deviate people from the right path, and therefore Kant always searched an universal law that was always applicable at all times and not depending on the circumstances, which is pretty similar to the principle formulated by Aquinas. Instead of defining this as a principle, he defined these as imperatives or obligations. In his view there were to different obligations, categorical and hypothetical. The hypothetical one demanded an action in order to result in another action. In other words, this means that action A must be performed in order to obtain B as a result, and we are morally obliged to perform A only and only if B is legitimate and A produces as a sure outcome B. On the other hand instead categorical imperatives, are actions that are performed for its own sake. Since, this imperative is too subjective, which means that could change from person to person, it should be known a priori whether the action is good or not. Therefore, people should act according to maxims that later on can be transformed into universal laws, applicable in all the circumstances. Only in this way people can judge the actions of other people. Like Aquinas also to Kant it is always immoral to act in a way, while we wish that others act in another way. Furthermore, according to Kant people were given practical reason, which was the quality that determined the universal maxims we all should obey to. Again, this visions is a lot similar to the vision of Aquinas, who believed that conscience reminded us of the principles (his universal law).
Furthermore, according to Kant people were gifted with free will, in other words, making them able to choose the paths to follow on their own. Therefore there were two different wills in his vision: heteronomous and autonomous. The first will meant obeying to rules formulated externally, like action A results in B, so following the hypothetical imperatives, while on the other hand the autonomous one was self-legislating, meaning that we were gifted with free-will. In order to be happy, furthermore, Kant thought that people had to accept the fact that we lived forever, the existence of God and freedom. The first two are again similar to the ones formulated by Aquinas. More specifically, Kant believed that in order to act in a morally correct way, people had to be given autonomous will, and furthermore, that happiness corresponded with virtue, which was not casual but guaranteed by a God, and the moral perfection that was required by
Mill on the other hand was one of the most important exponents of utilitarianism together with Bentham. They both believed that pleasure meant the avoidance of pain. Furthermore, Bentham believed that the happiness of a community was nothing more than the sum of the happiness of all the individuals constituting it. According to Mill there were two different kinds of pleasures: bodily and intellectual. The second type of pleasure was considered by the philosopher to be higher, while in the meanwhile the second one was considered to be lower. Furthermore, Mill believed that most of the time it was impossible to reach the ultimate happiness and that for that reason human had to avoid actions which caused pain, instead of focusing more on the ones that produced pleasure. According to him, pain was only accepted when this brought to pleasure eventually. This vision is shared almost by all the philosophers cited in the paper, especially by Aquinas (action A which produces as outcome B). Furthermore, he believed that moral principles governed every-day moral life of individuals. He also believed that human-beings were governed by conscience, self-esteem and guilt when deciding which action was the best to perform. His visions differed from the one of Bentham, because he stated that when people commit wrong actions, then there is always these three qualities punishing the individual.
Mill believed that a country in order to guarantee the freedom in deciding how to behave in certain occasions, they should punish humans only when they harm others, and instead treating diversity with respect. He believed that in this way, society was more able to progress and to avoid social stagnation. In his book "On liberty", the liberty of opinion was valuable because the unpopular might have been right, while on the other hand when an opinion is wrong, this helps to better understand the position of each individualistic opinion. The liberty of action was also considered to be important, because, the non-comformist way might eventually be correct, and individuals who behave in a certain way might do it for self-interest.
In conclusion, this paper helped me a lot to understand better the authors that we have been studying during this class. Personally, I liked all of the five authors, although the vision I like the most is Aristotle's. This is because as we can see in the paper he was the father of most of the visions of all the philosophers that came later on. Most of them are shared also by philosophers such as Kant, who lived literally thousands years later than him. This is why in my opinion he did a great job to formulate his philosophy, as to me Aristotle has always been the father of philosophy. Furthermore, personally I also completely share the view that contemplation a quality that helps us to reach ultimate happiness, because through deep reasoning we are able to decide whether one action might have a good or bad impact on our lives.