Topic One: Please respond to three below

1. (Terry)

Which of the moral philosophies do you personally favor? How does it impact your decision?

I would have to say that I favor the mindset of egoism. I believe this because everything that humans do is majority for themselves. Egoism is the philosophy principle that treats self-interest as the foundation of morality. I have really thought a lot about this stance throughout my classes and lean more and more towards egoism as time goes by. I don’t believe that having an egoistic mindset is necessarily bad (can be if used for selfish gains). The opposite of egoism is altruism which is principle of the selfless concern for the well-beings of others. I believe true altruism is extremely rare. The reasoning I have is because even in selfless acts majority of people still gain a sense of happiness or joy from helping other. Helping other might be how they were raised and if they didn’t, they would feel like a bad person. So is doing something for someone so you feel like a better person truly altruistic of egoistic in nature.

2. (Edgar)

Third, I will personally favor the virtue ethics philosophy, which in accordance with Farrel (2018) framework, suggests that the decisions must be based on the moral virtues and that of a person’s character and beliefs. Aristotle’s once mentioned that if you can focus on being good, the proper actions will follow. However, working in the military has also impacted my life, where I tend to evaluate the ethical concerns focused on the procedural and distributive basis as per the justice ethics philosophy.

3. (Jonathan)

There isn’t one single moral philosophy that I favor. It seems that I and I would like to think that most have a blend of many moral philosophies. The one that has got me thinking a bit is egoism because I do recall how I once heard someone say that when people perform an act of kindness and it somehow gets out to the public, it usually tells you that the person doing the act of kindness was doing it for the attention or their character to be viewed in a positive light. Who knows, maybe those performing acts of kindness were just highlighted by someone else, but I must admit that performing acts of kindness does make one feel good.