Heresy-rationalist apologetic is about new religions, involving an analysis and refutation of doctrines and worldviews that are used by evangelicals.(1) The apologetic approach requires a confrontational style more suited to debate than understanding and conversation that are not doctrinal based. This biblical basis is problematic.(2)…
Rational and guilty means that the individual was fully aware of what they did and knew it was wrong, and illegal, but did it anyway.…
to be able to make rational decisions. If one cannot make rational decisions then one will either…
In chapter one, The Nonrational Foundations of Rationality, Collins explains that humans in society act on more than rational thinking. Being considered as a superior race, human beings pride themselves on their capacity to use reason in order to problem solve and create new science and technology. However, if this was a completely rational world, Collins argues, no social contracts would exist and thus, society would not exist at all, the world would just be composed of isolated individuals. It is not rational to trust that other people's actions will benefit the individual. Collins alludes to people having their self-interest as their main concern. So how does a society form or stick together as a cohesive unit? To help explain this, Collins use the free bus example, in which he concluded the rational thing for an individual to do is to expect or encourage everyone else to be to contribute to the fund of the bus, while the individual just rides on for free. The system could work if people felt a sense of duty…
Every text is constructed for a purpose; the composer is trying to convey and embed their agenda into the reader by persuading them to accept their perspective on key events, personalities and/or situations. Through the manipulation of various textual forms, structures and language composers persuade their audience to adopt their perspective. Composers often decide to present conflicting perspectives to truly engage their audience. By demonstrating the concept of conflicting perspectives the composer is able to glorify their perspective in contrast to another to enforce their agenda, they position the audience through language to side with them. The tight narrative “Julius Caesar” by William Shakespeare’s utilises the final days of Caesar’s…
A moral system is rational because it is based on principles of logical reason accessible to ordinary persons.…
Immanuel Kant’s deontological theory of ethics is the normative ethical position that evaluates the morality of actions. Unlike the empiricist supporters of Utilitarianism, Kant was an unquestionable supporter of rationalism; the idea that pure reason can tell us how the world is, independent of experience. This idea is referred to as an a priori approach, because it makes the assumption that reasoning or knowledge is denoted from theoretical deduction rather than from observation or experience.…
Before I go about pitting these two systems against each other, however, it would be best to first give you a (hopefully) sufficient understanding of what composes each respective ethical theory, so that you can better follow the comparison ant critique of the theories later on. First, let us take a look at Kant's system of ethics, which is based on the notion of duty. For Kant, this duty was something that had to be motivated from something that was larger than yourself and your emotion; it had to be drawn from an objective place, and with the right intentions in mind. Have you ever heard the adage that goes “doing the right thing for the wrong reason”? That would apply perfectly to Kant's theory. The result's of one's actions mean nothing if the intentions are selfish in nature. To Kant, intention was perhaps even more important than the results of your actions, due to the fact that one can not always have full control over the ends of their intentions (intentions that, in order to be in accordance to…
Rationalism offers a naturalistic alternative to appeals to religious accounts of human nature and conduct. During the 17th century nobody had many rights towards anything like being sent to war. It was hard to fight for freedom and rights.This is why Patrick Henry said "give me liberty or give me death". This quote from Patrick Henry means give me freedom or kill me.…
He believed that our actions must come from a sense of Duty, not because we care for or love one another but because it is our Duty to “respect the Moral Law” (p. 246). Judging the importance of a decision based on whether or not it was following a rule or set of rules is called deontological ethics. He believed that it was not the consequences of the action which were important but the person’s motive carrying out the said action. Many disagree with Kant saying that we must have a foundation to start from, a reason such as love or concern to do what is morally…
Emmanuel Kant (hereinafter “Kant”) believes that Ethics is categorical and states that our moral duties are not dependent on feelings but on reason. He further states that our moral duties are unconditional, universally valid, and necessary, regardless of the possible consequences or opposition to our inclinations (Pojman and Vaughn 239).…
This theory has been deemed an anti-concept i.e. an inconsistent concept that obliterates other cardinal concepts. In this case, duty destroys rationality. Ayn Rand goes as far as to say duty is “a metaphysical and psychological killer”, thereupon hindering a man’s capacity to act according to his will and reason. Kant’s philosophy of duty is self-refuting. It relies on the rationality of humans and yet its authoritarian deontology deprives man of his rationality and confines him to strictly objective speculation and limited mental processing. If one strives only to pursue one’s duty and to live whereby the rules of an unaccountable authority take precedence over one’s own judgment, one cannot have the opportunity to be rational.…
Kant’s diagnoses the human condition as human’s frailty and impurity when distinguishing between one’s self interested inclinations and moral duty. Humans were “…finite beings with our individual needs…yet we [were] also rational beings, and for Kant that include[d]…the recognition of moral obligations” (Stevenson and Haberman p.155). The contrast and ever-apparent strain between these opposing sides of human nature fuel Kant’s diagnosis of human’s frailty. In Kant’s conception of human reason and action, he distinguished between categorical and hypothetical imperatives which displayed the human struggles regarding what decisions were morally right. Self interested desires, “…which involve[ed] only the selection of means to satisfy one’s own desire” (p.151) could be defined as a hypothetical imperative. However, categorical imperative claims “…that morality is fundamentally a function of [one’s] reason, not just [one’s] feelings” (p.151). Knowing what was morally right and doing what was morally right was the depravity of human nature, the choice of choosing one’s own happiness over their obligations to those who surround them. The desire for instant gratification from any action hinders human’s consideration of longer-term self-interest. The difficulty arises when the one must decide to postpone immediate satisfaction in the interest of future goals; a “…balance to strike between living for the moment and planning for the future….” (p.155) must be reached. Human’s struggles with moral decisions and personal gain exemplify their…
Kant, a soft determinist, said that in order to make a moral decision we must have freedom. Kant believed that the ability to make moral decisions lay within the existence of freedom; stating that if we are not free to make our own decisions those decisions could not be moral as we were never free to make that decision in the first place. Kant thought that a person could be blamed for an action if they could have acted differently; for example if a person’s family is held at gunpoint and they are forced to open a safe they cannot be blamed as they did not have a choice. If we are to have free will we must have the ability to make a decision that is unhindered; Kant believed that we must have free will if we are to be help morally responsible for our actions, if God did not give us free will then our decisions cannot be considered immoral or moral as we would have had to act in the way we did. Thus we cannot be held responsible; a good moral action cannot be praised as you had no other option, whilst an immoral action cannot be punished as once again there was no free choice.…
2. Rational choice perspective is when someone makes a decision based on the most benefit given by the choices. If doing something unethical is more beneficiary to the person as oppose to doing something ethical, than as rational choice perspective goes that person will do the unethical thing. For example, there is one sandwich left and you are hungry and you see someone else who is hungry also. Instead of doing the ethical thing by given that person the last sandwich you decide to eat it yourself because you benefit from it. That is rational choice perspective of learning unethical behavior.…