Nov 14, · A level essay subjects a internet essay. introduction essay curse! on blessing essays band sample Ielts self or @ 9, frankenstein essay prompts ap farmer in hindi essay essay on article in english in words rules for writing a persuasive essay, short essay about school trip, how to write an essay for publication: what is junk food essay! A set of classic essays on responsibility for action, including justifications of praise and blame. Fingarette, Herbert () On responsibility (Basic Books, New York). Another set of classic essays, including the argument that blame is intelligible insofar as it connects up with someone’s pre-existing concern for others College Students around the world use our essay writing service to for various academic essays, assignments, homework, term paper across all disciplines. We provide cheap, fast and easy way to get help with your college essays. Tap into the genius of hundreds of academic essay writers and homework doers for as little as $5
Praise and Blame | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Perhaps essays about the internet is this confusion more evident than in our understandings of praise and blame.
This entry will contrast three influential philosophical accounts of our everyday practices of praise and blame, in terms of how they might be justified. On the one hand, a broadly Kantian approach sees responsibility for actions as relying on forms of self-control that point back to the idea of free will. On this account praise and blame are justified because a person freely chooses her actions. Praise and blame respond to the person as the chooser of her deed; they recognize her dignity as a rational agent, as Kantians tend to put it.
This approach sharply contrasts with two further ways of thinking about the issues. One is utilitarian, where praise and blame are justified in terms of their social benefits. Another, essays about the internet, more complex approach is roughly Aristotelian, essays about the internet.
This approach situates practices of praise essays about the internet blame in terms of our on-going essays about the internet with one another. This approach stresses the importance of mutual accountability, moral educationand assessments of character in terms of the many vices and virtues.
This article will not try to convey the exact details of these accounts, but to show how these ways of looking at mutual accountability capture important parts of our everyday commonsense. Another central figure in this debate, Bernard Williams, agrees that Kant captured a widespread tendency of modern moral thinking, but also claims that there exist important counter-tendencies in our actual practices of responsibility.
For Williams, ancient Greek understandings are actually more realistic and helpful than the Kantian one. So far as our modern praising and blaming actually make sense, he claims, they are better captured by a roughly Aristotelian account.
There are some important differences between praise and blame that will not be central to this entry; in fact, blame will get the greatest attention here. This is partly because praise seems less problematic: misplaced blame is felt as deeply unfair, not least because being exposed to blame is unpleasant and costly in a way that being praised is not.
But it is principally because blame has a closer connection than praise to matters of intense philosophical interest, including freedom, responsibility and desert. We often praise inanimate objects such as art works or buildings and animals a loyal pet, for examplealthough we could not blame such entities, however deeply dissatisfied we felt with them.
The focus of this article, however, essays about the internet, will be upon entities that are clearly open to blame as well as praise: human beings. What is blame, such that only human beings can be blamed? Philosophers differ on how far certain emotions may be central to blame this relates to a wider dispute, regarding which emotions, if any, constitute a proper basis for moral action.
What is clear is that blame suggests both responsibility and culpability. Here, responsibility only implies that the act can be identified with a person, such that she can reasonably be expected to respond for it in some way. That is, it does not necessarily imply fault, or culpability. For further aspects of responsibility, see the sister entry to this article, responsibility.
Another article also examines the topic of free will in depth. The free will debate has become an old chestnut of modern philosophy. It is an intuitively plausible way of approaching the issues — familiar to many even before they encounter philosophical texts. It is perhaps surprising, then, that this debate is actually a rather modern one. The basic gist is this: if I am to be responsible really responsible for my conduct, then it must be within my control.
However, if it is true that every event in the universe is determined by causal laws, then this must be true of the events that constitute my actions. Therefore, essays about the internet, my conduct cannot really be within my control; therefore, I am not really responsible for my conduct. Two conclusions immediately suggest themselves. One is that it is incoherent to praise or blame me — and everyone else — for our actions, because it is so difficult to doubt the causal well-orderedness of the universe.
The alternative conclusion, scarcely more appealing, is that the human will somehow sits outside this causal framework — ie, we have free will — because it is unthinkable that our moral ideas be so desperately incoherent. Both lines of thought are incompatibilist ; that is, they see the ideas of responsibility involved in praise and blame as incompatible with the causal well-orderedness of the universe.
But while both attract some limited support among philosophers, the overwhelming consensus now lies with compatibilism. This is simply the thesis that responsibility and causal order are compatible. Most philosophers agree that the alleged incompatibility results from some important confusions, although there is much less consensus about what these may be. At least one area of confusion is clear, essays about the internet, however, and forms the central issue of this article: what sort of responsibility for conduct is involved in praise and blame?
Several familiar points in the free will debate are helpful for approaching this. In the first place, it is well-known that this debate does not turn on the truth of determinism as such, essays about the internet. Determinism is the idea that every event is determined by fixed causal laws. Yet it may well be that every event is somehow random in origin. One interpretation of quantum physics claims that causal laws are the product of statistical regularities, while these regularities stem from a essays about the internet infinite number of random events.
So far as the human will is concerned, this makes no difference. If my conduct is the product of chance, this makes me no more responsible for it than does its being generated by causal laws.
The point is that if I am to be blamed or praised, then I must control my conduct — not causal laws, nor mere chance, nor some particular combination of the two.
Second, the free will debate bears a disquieting similarity to an older controversy. If God knows what we will do then this seems to imply that it is already decided whether we will act well or badly, essays about the internet. And this, in turn, suggests that it makes no sense to punish or reward us. Theologians developed various doctrines to overcome this difficulty, but few sound convincing to modern ears — perhaps because the problem itself is no longer a live one, even for most believers.
Kant is equivocal, essays about the internet, however, as to whether only God might make this evaluation, or whether human beings might also form reasonable opinions on the matter. But especially if we take the point of view of mutual, human accountability, it is not obvious why we should believe any such single evaluation to be possible, or what role this evaluation might play in our individual or collective lives.
Certainly, essays about the internet, we usually praise and blame in terms of particular actions and particular vices and virtues — not a good or bad will. Third, this way of framing the issues creates a problematic gulf between normal moral agents adult human beings of sound mind and other creatures — animals and children. Although it is grossly implausible that there are no relevant moral differences between the other animals, children, and human adults, it is no more plausible that the free will simply pops into existence at a certain stage of human development.
Within a Christian framework this issue was less problematic: human beings, and only human beings, have souls. Nonetheless, we tend to think there is something sufficiently distinctive about human action, so that many non-religious people find the idea of free will plausible, and almost everyone assumes that blame if not praise only makes sense with regard to mature? human beings. Taking the last three points together generates a further point, essays about the internet. One way of retaining the idea of the will might be to essays about the internet of it as the bundle of capacities that are needed to control action in the light of moral concerns, these capacities being set only at such a level that all adult human beings of sound mind really seem to possess them.
But two points need to be kept in mind about such a strategy. For the utilitarianpraise and blame, like all our other practices, can only be justified in terms of their social consequences.
The utilitarian case is straightforward, essays about the internet. Blame and praise encourage us to perform socially valuable actions and to avoid socially costly actions.
If we know we will be blamed for greed or cruelty, for example, then we have powerful motives to avoid these. The stingy person might make a good banker, but a bad organizer of social occasions. This approach does seem to capture important truths: we want to encourage and discourage different sorts of activity, and we need to have a sense of what different people are good at. If the bad outcome was not chosen by the person for example, she was forced to essays about the internet that way by someone elsethen there is nothing to be gained from blaming them much better to blame the person who forced her.
But the utilitarian account faces a simple objection: does it really provide for responsibility, still more culpability? For example, if we know that someone does not respond well to criticism, it seems that the utilitarian case for blame is undermined. We would do much better to flatter and cajole them into acting differently. Of course, the utilitarian might reply that essays about the internet is often what we in fact do with such people.
Further, he might add that we do still blame such people when we discuss their characters behind their backs, perhaps describing them as self-righteous or stubborn. What seems to be missing in this response, however, is the idea that the person deserves blame. Especially when we move from blame to the question of sanctions or punishment, this lack of desert seems to present a real problem for the utilitarian account.
Utilitarians face a more complex criticism, which goes beyond the scope of this entry. Historically more concerned with essays about the internet actions of government than individuals, utilitarianism never developed a realistic moral psychology — that is, very roughly, an account of what makes the decent person tick.
But if we want to understand responsibility, our capacity to accept praise and blame as well as our tendency to dole them out, essays about the internet, then we need to have a fairly good picture of moral agency. As with the utilitarians, Aristotle saw essays about the internet need to talk about praise and blame in terms of free will. Aristotle speaks of whether acts are voluntaryessays about the internet, and whether we attribute them to a person or to other factors. Some have ascribed this way of framing the issues to a lack of moral or scientific sophistication on the part of the ancient Greeks.
At first glance, it looks as if Aristotle takes it for granted that we are responsible for our actions, so that others can reasonably essays about the internet or blame or punish us. What he does is to highlight various conditions that lessen or cancel our responsibility.
He discusses force of events, threats and coercion, ignorance, intoxication and bad character. Yet, taken together, his account shows us the basic elements involved in being a person who can reasonably be praised or blamed.
The first limitation upon voluntary action that Aristotle discusses is force of circumstances. His well-known example concerns a ship caught in a storm; the sailors must throw goods overboard if the ship is not to sink NE a.
In this case the action is not fully voluntary, and we would not blame the sailors for their actions. Nor, of course, would we blame the storm: the undesirable consequence, the loss of the goods, must be chalked off as the product of natural causes, for which no one can be blamed. Note that such cases are extreme examples of the force of necessity under which we always live — we are always constrained in our actions by circumstances, although we only tend to notice this when the constraint is sudden or unexpected, essays about the internet.
If blame were to arise in such a situation, it would be where the sailors failed to take account of necessity, so that the ship and many aboard perished. In fact, it tends to be the interference of other people that causes us the most grief — and which really causes problems for responsibility attributions.
Such interference can take many forms, essays about the internet, but its paradigmatic forms are coercion and manipulation, essays about the internet. It depends on what action my coercer is demanding of me, and what threats he makes. This makes it clear that a central issue at stake in attributions of responsibility is the expectations that people have of one another. There are some forms of coercion we do not usually expect people to resist, but there are also some sorts of action that we think people should never undertake, regardless of such factors.
In such cases praise and blame are clearly working to clarify and reinforce these expectations — in other words, they provide for a form of moral education.
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, time: 13:43Montaigne, Michel de | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
A set of classic essays on responsibility for action, including justifications of praise and blame. Fingarette, Herbert () On responsibility (Basic Books, New York). Another set of classic essays, including the argument that blame is intelligible insofar as it connects up with someone’s pre-existing concern for others Nov 14, · A level essay subjects a internet essay. introduction essay curse! on blessing essays band sample Ielts self or @ 9, frankenstein essay prompts ap farmer in hindi essay essay on article in english in words rules for writing a persuasive essay, short essay about school trip, how to write an essay for publication: what is junk food essay! Essay on the Internet! Find high quality essays on the ‘Internet’ especially written for kids, children and school students. These essays will also guide you to learn about the history, impacts, role, uses, benefits, disadvantages and misuse of internet
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