A Judgment Of Ethics Essay Research Paper — страница 3

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Plato is the Form of the Good, and knowledge of this Form is the source of guidance in moral decision making. Plato also argued that to know the good is to do the good. The corollary of this is that anyone who behaves immorally does so out of ignorance. This conclusion follows from Plato’sconviction that the moral person is the truly happy person, and because individuals always desire their own happiness, they always desire to do that which is moral. However, In The Politics, Aristotle does not regard politics as a separate science from ethics, but as the completion, and almost a verification of it. The moral ideal in political administration is only a different aspect of that which also applies to individual happiness. Humans are by nature social beings, and the possession of

rational speech in itself leads us to social union. The state is a development from the family through the village community, an offshoot of the family. Formed originally for the satisfaction of natural wants, it exists afterwards for moral ends and for the promotion of the higher life. The state in fact is no mere local union for the prevention of wrong doing, and the convenience of exchange. It is also no mere institution for the protection of goods and property. It is a genuine moral organization for advancing the development of humans.Aristotle continues by making several general points about the nature of moral virtues, such as desire regulating virtues. First, he argues that the ability to regulate our desires is not instinctive, but learned and is the outcome of both

teaching and practice. Second, he notes that if we regulate our desires either too much or too little, then we create problems. Moreover, he argues that desire regulating virtues are character traits, and are not to be understood as either emotions or mental faculties. At the heart of Plato’s philosophy is his theory of Forms, or Ideas. Ultimately, his view of knowledge, his ethical theory, his psychology, his concept of the state, and his perspective on art must be understood in terms of this theory. Plato’s theory of Forms and his theory of knowledge are so interrelated that they must be discussed together. Influenced by Socrates, Plato was convinced that knowledge is attainable. He was also convinced of two essential characteristics of knowledge. First, knowledge must be

certain and infallible. Second, knowledge must have as its object that which is genuinely real as contrasted with that which is an appearance only. Because that which is fully real must, for Plato, be fixed, permanent, and unchanging, he identified the real with the ideal region of being as opposed to the physical world of becoming. One consequence of this view was Plato’s rejection of empiricism, the claim that knowledge is derived from sense experience. He thought that propositions derived from sense experience have, at most, a degree of probability. They are not certain. Furthermore, the objects of sense experience are changeable phenomena of the physical world. Hence, objects of sense experience are not proper objects of knowledge.Plato’s own theory of knowledge is found

in the Republic, particularly in his discussion of the image of the divided line and the myth of the cave. In the former, Plato distinguishes between two levels of awareness: opinion and knowledge. Claims or assertions about the physical or visible world, including both commonsense observations and the propositions of science, are opinions only. Some of these opinions are well founded; some are not; but none of them counts as genuine knowledge. The higher level of awareness is knowledge, because there reason, rather than sense experience, is involved. Reason, properly used, results in intellectual insights that are certain, and the objects of these rational insights are the abiding universals, the eternal Forms or substances that constitute the real world. Nevertheless, At the

heart of Plato’s philosophy is a vision of reality that sees the changing world around us and the things within it as mere shadows or reflections of a separate world of independently existing, eternal, and unchanging entities called forms or ideas. Ordinary objects are what they are and have the features they do in virtue of their relation to or participation in these more fundamental realities. Forms are the proper objects of knowledge or understanding, and the desire to attain understanding of them is the proper dominant motivation in a healthy and happy human life. The apprehension and appreciation of formal reality makes life worth living; it also makes one moral. However, unlike his teacher Plato, Aristotle was much concerned with natural phenomena. He was impressed in