PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS

Philosophical Essays

Philosophical Essays

MORAL ISSUE: Is self-realization the measure of appropriate action

The concept of self-realization found its profound meaning in the works of Aristotle.

Strengths

Aristotle practically elaborated the concept of self-raelization unlike Plato who fantasized the world as being perfect. Thus while his works were authentic and justified, we can still realte to Aristotle more.

Weaknesses

Aristotle has not provided convincing arguments about self-realizations in his works, while also failing to address the potentials on which it is based.

The Rational Good is fascinating for how it reveals just how indebted Hobhouse was to nineteenth-century classical utilitarianism, particularly John Stuart Mill's version. Hobhouse was just as much a modern utilitarian as Mill is often now characterized, as he was a new liberal inspired equally by Green. And he did not hesitate to acknowledge these theoretical debts, conceding that his moral theory stood closely to Mill's utilitarianism, on one hand, and Green's ethical idealism, on the other. Indeed, Hobhouse's very definition of rational, good exhibits just how dedicated he was to accommodating Mill's conception of happiness and Green's conception of self-realization. In other words, for Hobhouse, self-realizing lives were simultaneously carefree lives. Happiness is the “feeling tone” that accompanies or marks self-realizing lives. Together, self-realization and happiness constituted logical goodness. Because happiness moved in tandem with self-realization, promoting happiness promoted self-realization too, making Millian-improved utilitarianism a perfectly satisfactory substitute method of practical reasoning (Aristotle, 1998).

MORAL ISSUE: Is the greatest good of the greatest number (or the greatest net benefit) the measure of appropriate action?

Jeremy Bentham emphasizes upon the thought that the right action is a measure of the greatest pleasure.

Strengths

Bentham's theory served as a rfeorming mechanism for the early indutrial period, when it was goiung through trying times.

Weaknesses

Bentham was defiant of the fact that animals could hunt with pleasures as well as humans, and to make a maximum of pleasure the measure of right action was to equate humans with animals.

Bentham's answer to the question of the source of value and our attitude to the good was developed in his second appeal to the concepts of pleasure and pain as the ultimate sources of our judgments about right and wrong. Bentham does not make the simple elision of rightness with what we are most attracted to on psychological grounds; the relationship between his psychological and ethical hedonism is more complex. The greater quantity of pleasure an action elicited in ...