John Stuart Mill and Utilitarianism Essay Example for Free

John Stuart Mill and Utilitarianism Essay John Stuart Mill published Utilitarianism in 1861 in installments in Frasers Magezine it was later brought out in book form in 1863. The book offers a candidate for a first principle of morality, a principle that provides us with a criterion distinquishing right and wrong. The unilitarian candidate is the principle of utility, which holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happpiness. By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain and the privation of pleasure. One version of cecular utilitarianism was represented by William Godwin the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley, who achieved great notoriety with the publication of hil Political Justice of 1793. Godwins use of the principle of utility for the cause of radical political and social critique began the identification of utilitarianism with anti-religiosity and with dangerous democratic values. The second version of secular utilitarianism, and the one that inspired Mill, arose from the work of Jeremy Bentham. Benthan, who was much more successful than Godwin at building a movement around his ideas, employed the principle of utility as a device of political, social, and legal criticism. Benthams interest in the principle of utility did not arise from concern about ethical theory as much as from concern about lefislative and legal reform. Though Bentham and Godwin intended it to have this function in the late eighteenth century, utilitarianism became influential only when tied with the political machinery of the Radical party, which had particular prominence on the English scene in the 1830s.

Defining the Conception on God Essay -- Baruch Spinoza, philosophical a

What must be factual for anything to be factual, what must exist for anything to be in existence? For Spinoza, before you can fully comprehend Ethics you have to be familiar with metaphysics. Metaphysic concerns itself with the fundamental principles that characterize all; metaphysic is the ground from which everything comes from. This is the rationale for why he initiates Ethics with God and nature as an entirety before he ever begins to converse on the human mind. Spinoza was anti-religious in his stance; he did not articulate of a God on a theological or religious aspect but as a metaphysic aspect on the nature of reality. Spinoza concurs with the religious conception that there is in reality an intimate relationship between man and God but not by the Christian notion on the relationship, his ideas on this connection is very diverse from those views of Christians. Spinoza believed nature to be one and god to be one. This is to pronounce that the mind and body are equally truthful and human nature is actually one in itself. This consideration demonstrates that man is united to God in Spinoza’s observation. Spinoza uses the geometrical method to help those understand God and human nature, he knew one would have to follow the natural order of entities because before one can fully comprehend human nature, they have to be aware of the basic truth of the nature of reality as a whole. To truly understand God and the order of nature you must first establish an understanding of the universal laws of nature, Spinoza use of the geometrical method helps do just that. The geometrical method is very logically and is used to recognize the basic truths of nature from the start and the laws that govern thought and extension, this being all th... ...ruly desires is one free. The power of God itself which is in all of us in some sense a lesser or greater degree. This is also to say that existence just doesn’t happen to exist, it necessary because it is infinite and eternal. Existence is what has to exist for anything to exist, so if anything exists than is in fact God who exists. With the use of the geometrical method, Spinoza is able to identify and make the conception of God intelligible to one. Giving one the ability to understand God and the human nature so that one can fully understand Ethics by this method. Since one cannot fully comprehend human nature until they are aware of the basic truth of the nature of reality. For the human mind to have the basic substance to understand oneself including nature and God, by thought and extension, showing that every mind is in fact capable of understanding God.

Effects of cyber ego on morality Essay

When one is in a virtual environment for long, one soon becomes convinced that the cyber space world is the real world which is the turning point in his life after which everything turns against him. This virtual world that is mistaken to be the real world is a parallel world that one is in. the presence of one in the virtual world that is non – existent leads one to fall in a state is consciousness which is very different from the one in the real world. After this, one starts to think differently, act in a way one has never acted before and a lot of other things that soon do not make sense to him self either, but this is a fact that although one knows there is something wrong, one can not help it. (Johnson 2003) It becomes a part of one’s life and is difficult to get out of it. After being in a parallel universe that is all made up, there is different stimuli that then change and guides our behaviors. It is a journey which a lot of people find interesting. On their journey to no where, when they are entering the virtual world, they take along the best ethics that their religion could teach them, wonderful morals that they learnt from their parents since they were kids and the cultural ethics that they grew in since they were kids; all that is with them when they are entering the virtual world, but it is ironic that when they come out of it for something they are completely different. (Pritchard 2000) One is a completely different individual which some how loses all its values that were taught to him or her during their life span and all the ethics and morals that they learned while they were in school and all that goes deep down the drain. How the virtual world affects our culture, values, morals, ethics and perception of which we are and of what the world is, changes; is what we will be discussing through out this report. (Ess 2006) When one enters a virtual environment, it is a battle of what is real and what one has left behind. This is where one’s cyber ego comes into picture. Cyber ego is primarily what a person thinks of one self in a virtual environment. There is no doubt that there is a lot of artificial intelligence involved in the so called virtual environment that one enters in, but there is a problem of cyber ego that makes many individuals question themselves before entering an environment as such. The moral values are lost. This is not only true but has been experienced by many people who have made a mistake of entering a virtual environment. Talking to different people, people that one is not aware of as ever even existing before they started talking in the cyber world, it changes one’s attitude and the stimuli that one guided the person’s perception and state of emotion; this all mutate and make the individual a different person, for all wrong reasons. (Schultz 2005) There are a lot of things that have an impact on our morals and ethics. For example, the more time one spends on it, the more aggressive one gets. This aggressiveness can be because one can no more differentiate between the real world that one lives in and the virtual world that one is in most of the time of the day. This aggressiveness adds to the change in one’s attitude and hence personality. (Ess 2006) The changes in one’s attitude and personality all depends on how much one might be engrossed in cyber ego. How much one would want oneself to be a part of the virtual environment and adopt cyber ego is the question that will also answer how much a person changes and becomes a truly different person that one was not. It is the difference of decisions that one makes that leads one towards developing a cyber ego being unhealthy to an extent that it would drive the life long morals and ethics out of the person and make one a totally different person. Having this said, it is of utter concern of as to how the changes take place. Some claim that the fact that hours and hours of the week are spent in front of the computer screens being in a world that is non existent. Having a personality that is not the personality the person has in the real world, and faking that personality to be the real one; if so is done for hours, every single day of the week for months or even years, yes there will be a drastic change in what one believes and what one perceives. (George 2003)

Performance Art And Its Impact On The Public Arena

Women’s movements have long used their voices as a disruptive force to subvert and undermine the patriarchal institutions at work. It is through their art and writings that their voices are heard by those who are listening. However, only being heard by those who are willing to listen is not sufficient enough to permanently install their presence in the public arena. This is why artists have turned to the method of performance art to actively communicate their messages without being disregarded by the public. Performance art goes beyond the relative scope of visual art in that it is actually executed in front of an audience. It is an aggressive â€Å"form of consciousness raising† that not only breaches the confines of one’s personal space but†¦show more content†¦Transgendered models have the power to transcend patriarchal definitions of masculinity and femininity because they perform constructions of gender identity that are in direct opposition to â₠¬Å"forcibly imposed ideals of what bodies ought to be like† (Undoing Gender 114). They take it one step further through performance art by wielding not only their voices but also their bodies to disrupt political and hetero-cultural realities that perpetuate restrictive gender boundaries within public space. Before delving deeper into the debate over whether or not transgender modeling should be considered performance art, we must first understand that there is a direct correlation between biological sex and performed gender that creates heteronormative modes of feminine or masculine embodiment. Butler defines performed gender as â€Å"a kind of imitation†¦that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself† (Imitation and gender Insubordination 306). The body then is not an empty vessel on which gender norms and heterosexual identities are imposed upon. Rather, it is a result and consequence of us trying to imitate s omething that does not exist in the first place. We only continue to experience our bodies as gendered because we remain participants in the performance of gender and therefore in the production of gender. Through the performance of gender,