Borderline Personality Disorders Research Paper

Marginal Personality Disorders - Research Paper Example Frequently patients who are troublesome are marked with the confusion without completely investigating all other potential clarifications for conduct (Wirth, 2001). While it is viewed as one of the regularly analyzed conditions in the clinical setting with 10% of the populace experiencing the turmoil, one of the issues in stating a characterized commonness of the confusion is that frequently it is related with addictive practices or misdiagnosed (Swift 2010). There are three essential hypotheses that manage the treatment of marginal character issue. Clinicians look to organic, subjective conduct, and psychodynamic causes so as to move toward a successful course of treatment (Gunderson and Links, 2008). In the appraisal of conduct issue, finding a reason can be an illusive possibility. One of the prevalent issues with the confusion is the staggering feminization of the condition, the determination being one of the main zones of concern while rewarding a female patient. The relationshi p that ladies have with their social condition is an essential worry in the analysis of marginal character issue. ... The confusion can characterize the eventual fate of the individuals who experience the ill effects of its belongings with a progression of unsteady and ineffective connections. Pointless practices will likewise be normal making a failure to discover achievement and push ahead into a steady and secure life. The standards for determination will show up in early adulthood set apart by an assortment of impacts inside varieties of setting. The essential symptomatic models incorporate passionate unsteadiness, improper or extraordinary displeasure, reckless acts, impulsivity, precarious connections, personality unsettling influence, and incessant sentiments of vacancy or weariness (Wirth-Cauchon, 2001). These essential rules is additionally characterized by a rundown of settings from which a refined conclusion can be evaluated (see Appendix 1). The condition has the most elevated predominance among ladies, one of the essential drivers seeming, by all accounts, to be sexual maltreatment in a dolescence with an assortment of impacts at that point showing therefore later in adulthood. Too, different types of misuse, for example, disregard, psychological mistreatment, or physical maltreatment have showed up as antecedents to the advancement of the turmoil. In an investigation that contrasted different patients with BPD patients, 71% had endured injuries of physical maltreatment while 68% had endured sexual maltreatment, while 62% had seen genuine aggressive behavior at home (Wirth-Cauchon, 2001, p. 66). The most well-known comorbidity related with BPD is that of substance misuse. In any case, as indicated by Lee, Bagge, Schumacher, and Coffey (2010), the impacts of BPD are no higher or lower in substance abusers as they are in non-substance manhandling patients. Subsequently, the substance misuse is by all accounts a piece of the of the reckless conduct as opposed to a

Mass Media Filling the Moral Void Essay -- Morals Ethics Television En

Broad communications Filling the Moral Void A stroll down the boulevards of D.C. gives something other than exercise and landscape. It is an excursion through the phases of Mass Media. The primary magazine kiosk one spots is loaded with each paper one might need to peruse. A couple more strides down the walkway, and one can see the TVs blazing through the windows of ESPN Zone, and one is barraged by the blasting hints of radios from vehicle sound systems and stores the same. It is practically difficult to get away from the paw of Mass Media, on the grounds that there are not many spots to which media impact doesn't broaden. Through the start of Mass Media during the 1400’s to the present, TV, radio and computer games have become a huge piece of each child’s life. With media encompassing more than one’s close family, it is hard not to be impacted in regular day to day existence. Specialists keep on discussing the impact that Mass Media has on the young people of this age, and whether it is essential to deve lopment or an impedance on a child’s training. The initial step when investigating Mass Media and its persuasions is to discover how obviously it tends to be characterized. Broad communications are the mediums or channels through which pictures, data, and amusement are sent. As characterized by Professor Lawrence Grossberg of Communication Studies, Mass Media is actually that: media created from a solitary point to countless focuses or from a solitary source to a group of people of numerous individuals (Grossberg 8). Media can best be clarified as correspondence through TV, radio, papers or the Internet. Since Mass Media is shipped from a solitary source to various sources, it is difficult to acknowledge how every individual will see it. In reality, the sender of media has next to zero contro... ...on, is a subject that will be constantly examined. Regardless, regardless of which sort of media it is, somebody with consistently think that its engaging. Works Cited: Pastry specialist, Karen. Kick the TV propensity for seven days. Times-Picayune. 22 Apr. 2004. Lexis Nexis. 13 Feb. 2005 <http://web.lexis-nexis.com>. Grossberg, Lawrence, Ellen Wartella, and D. Charles Whitney. Media Making: Mass Media In A Popular Culture. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications Inc., 1998. Guernsey, Lisa. Tuning Into a Problem. The Washington Post. 9 Nov. 2004. Lexis Nexis. 14 Feb. 2005 <http://web.lexis-nexis.com>. Raymo, Chet. Bach on the Wing. The Boston Globe. 3 Oct. 2004: 34. Lexis Nexis. 13 Feb. 2005 <http://web.lexis-nexis.com>. Scheibe, Cyndy. TV in the Lives of Children. CRETv. 15 Feb. 2005. <http://www.ithaca.edu/CRETv>.

The Life Rationing Problem

The Life Rationing Problem Introduction: Keeping up with political news this month has, paradoxically, become a rather depressing pastime of mine. Sometimes, its fun to vanish into a world somewhat tangential to reality, somewhat well-defined, somewhat abstract, and entirely distracting. This is a more fleshed out version of a powerpoint literary presentation I gave at Alpha Delta Phi a while ago. So without further ado (keeping in mind that this is all very theoretical and somewhat subjective), lets dive in, shall we? We will examine scenarios in which some life must be lost, (a more specific case of the general rationing problem in which some people must lose out on what is being rationed) and will argue for how to resolve the life allocation problem ethically. In particular, we will argue that there is likely no rigorous moral principle that completely solves the problem, but that we can strongly depend on the moral measure of intuition to arrive at a solution. Careful Formulation To begin, we will attempt to find a moral principle that solves the problem. If such a principle exists, it should be able to account for differing intuitions in variants of the life-rationing problem. Suppose we simplistically define the problem as, “Given two scenarios, either of which will result in loss of life, what scenario is the more moral option to choose?” The problem is not very interesting, prima facie, if each scenario results in equalâ€"say 1â€"loss of life. Without further facts, we will be unable to make a meaningful decision. Is this true if we extend the situation to an unequal loss of lives depending on the scenario? Our intuition will be to simply pick the scenario that saves the greatest number of lives, a utilitarian approach at heart, but we will show this is not so straightforward by formulating two variants of the problem: The Organ Variant: Five people need organs or they will die. A doctor decides to grab a healthy patient who shows up for a checkup. He takes the patient’s organs and saves the five with them. The Scarce Medicine Variant: Five sick people each need a small dose of medicine or they will die. One other sick person needs a large dose of this medicine or will die as well. The doctor chooses to give the five the small doses rather than the one the large dose. We intuitively find the organ variant morally impermissible, and the scarce medicine variant morally permissible, despite their equal life-saving outcome. Thus our original moral intuition that we simply pick the case that saves more peopleâ€"call this the maximum principleâ€" requires refining. Saving the moral good The first important thing about the maximum principle is that it operates independently of the specifics of the scenarios, and thus doesn’t care enough about certain properties. What might it care more about, to be more effective? To see this, let’s consider the original uninteresting case where either scenario results in loss of precisely one life. The maximum principle will be unable to choose one over the other in this case. In particular, choosing one life over another will require a concept of deservednessâ€"one person deserving to live over the otherâ€"that the maximum principle doesn’t account for. Ethically, the only way the principle might possess a principle of deservedness were if it could give one person greater weight over the other. It seems plausible that such a weight would have to be a moral one. If one scenario involved saving a hardened murderer, the other a humanitarian, then the case seems clearer. Thus, for the maximum principle to be effective in cases of equality, we might refine it to the maximum goodness principle, which calls for the scenario that saves the maximum number of morally good people. In the humanitarian versus murderer situation, the result of this principle is certainly intuitively pleasing. It is also pleasing in the scarce medicine variant. In particular, we will have to assume a sort of equal morality among all people involved, in the absence of any other information, and thus saving the five instead of the one, saves five morally good people as opposed to one morally good person, which satisfies the maximum goodness principle. If however, these five were hardened murderers, and the one was a humanitarian, it doesn’t seem morally repugnant to save the one over the five. There are however three problems with this principle. Firstly, it requires that we have an independent system of morality, wherein moral goodness and badness can be defined and assigned. I claim this is necessary howeverâ€"in particular, if we are to prefer saving a person over another in a morally-directed life-rationing problem, a relevant weighting to consider seems to be their individual moralities. The problem of course is that we assume positive morality is an inherently good thing, but there is no truly universal system for gauging which actions are morally positive, and thus which kind of people are morally positive. To not be bogged down by this, we will have to grant the existence of some morally sound system, X, which simultaenously enforces and black-boxes (i.e. hides the internal workings of) moral weightings. Secondly, there is a convincing argument that can be made for the concept of moral luck, wherein a person’s moral rightness or wrongness might be entirely out of their handsâ€"perhaps a result of genetics or a terrible upbringing, and thus scenarios which necessarily work against them, such as the maximum goodness principle, form a system of double injusticeâ€"punishing a person even more for an already bad situation they are unable to control. However, there are two alternatives: choosing the morally positive person to die, which forces the same problem of punishing a person for a situation they are unable to control, and choosing randomly, which might be possible, but turns a blind eye to the significance of positive morality over negative morality. In particular, the existence of moral luck does not mitigate the expected negative consequences associated with a morally repugnant person, and it seems plausible to save the morally positive person, simply because of the value placed on moral positivity, a value that should be independent of moral luck. Finally, and crucially, the maximum goodness principle does not account for the organ variant. In particular, it would require that we kill the one healthy patient to save the five, if prima facie, we assume equal morality among everyone. But this is intuitively unappealing. Even more problematically, supposing the one patient whose organs we choose to harvest was to some slight degree more morally repugnant than the other five patients, we still find it intuitively problematic to kill him and take his organs. This suggests that the maximum goodness principle must be further refined. A similar scenario To make any potential moral principles we come up with even more appealing, we will bring up a third and popular variant of the life-rationing problem: The Train/Trolley Variant: Five people are bound to a rail, and an incoming train approaches. You stand nearby, and hold a switch which if pulled, directs the train to a different rail, which happens to have one person on it. You pull the switch anyway, saving five to kill the one. This seems morally permissible, and is in line with the result of the maximum goodness principle. However, note the similarity of the train variant with the organ variant. In both instances, ?Five people are in danger of death on the one hand. ?On the other hand, one person is not strictly in danger of death. ?If you do nothing, this one person survives. ?If you perform an action (*), you save the five. What makes the difference then is this action (*), despite these glaring similarities. In one case, you pull a switch. In the other, you harvest the organs. Thus, whatever moral principle may account for these intuitionsâ€"and whatever refinement our maximum goodness principle makesâ€"must be dependent solely on some property of these actions. What could this property be? Three candidates come to mind. 1)There is a moral distinction between killing a person (by collecting their organs) and letting them die (by pulling the switch). 2)Killing the patient involves introducing a new threat to him, whereas pulling the switch only redirects an existing threat. 3)Killing the patient involves a severity of action that affects our sensibilities. Pulling a switch is less macabre. We account for each of these theories in turn. The one person bound to the other rail in the train variant could plausibly attack (1) by insisting that pulling the switch is necessarily a killing action. They can plausibly insist that pulling the switch can’t quite be thought to be letting die, because they don’t die if you don’t pull the switch, and it is your action that is strictly responsible for their deathâ€"a marked distinction from, say, letting a “Do Not Resuscitate” patient die by doing nothingâ€"in which your inaction allows their death. This insistent life-frightened person could similarly attack (2) by analogous argument: that there is no threat to their lives, and that you knowingly introduce this threat by pulling the switch, and directing the train toward them. In the absence of the pulled switch, there is a complete absence of threats. As for (3), one would have to examine exactly what the grimness or macabre nature of the death has to say about the morality of the cause of death. In particular, if we say that the doctor who kills his patient has done something so reprehensible, we are in effect saying one of two things: a) that the manner by which he killed his patient is reprehensible or b) that the very act of killing his patient is reprehensible. Of course, we are trying to figure out what about killing the patient is so intuitively disturbing, and thus b) makes our argument circular, by claiming that killing the patient is what makes killing the patient reprehensible. On the other hand, a) redirects our question elsewhere, as we are concerned with the very nature of the killing, rather than the mechanics of the act itself. To see this, observe that if we know that pulling the switch will cause the train to have a greater impact on the one person it hitsâ€"inflicting a bloody and painful death worse than would be felt by the patient whose organ is harvestedâ€"it doesn’t change the result of our intuition that we should pull the switch (supposing not pulling still kills the five). Thus, the severity of death is independent of the problem we are trying to solve. We have thus considered three rather plausible theories, but none of them have failed to account for the three variants of the life-rationing problem, which would make us seem closer to the thesis statement of this blogpost. I claim we should not give up quite so easily. In particular, we will now proceed by supposing that there is indeed some unknown refinement we can make to the maximum goodness principle that can account for all three variants. We already established that such a refinement must depend on some property of the action performed, and thus we have a new principle, the modified principle: “the scenario to choose is the one that maximizes the moral goodness saved, subject to some constraint Y.” The modified principle can account for all three variants: the maximum goodness portion of it can account for our intuitions in the train and scarce medicine variant, whereas the “constraint Y” portion of it can account for why we don’t harvest the organs of an innocent personâ€"because such an action disobeys the Y constraint. This is, for now at least, the best we can do, supposing we can find Y. However, we could at this point spend our effort producing a counterexample to the modified principle, despite the vagueness of Y. How can we accomplish such a task? Well, observe that the modified principle does make a statement: it places a constraint on a specific actionâ€"harvesting the organs of a healthy patient against their will to save othersâ€"and thus, it suffices to come up with a hypothetical situation in which this seemingly awful action is certainly permissible. Three attempts We could be heinously unfair, and say: “How about if you had to choose between forcibly harvesting the organs of five people, versus harvesting the organs of one?” In this case, the prima facie morally plausible action to take is to forcibly harvest the organs of one person, but when either choice forces the Y-violating action, we are being deliberately obtuse. Thus, we must model a situation in which one action to take is the organ harvesting one, but the other option to take preserves the vagueness of Y, and is not necessarily in violation of it, and yet the better action to take would violate Y. This second attempt could go along the lines of: “Suppose you had a town of 1,000 people, all of whom have mistakenly ingested some deadly poison. Suppose a tourist mistakenly swallowed the only cure, thinking it were a piece of fruit. However, this cure can be extracted if this tourist was killed, and the liquids of his organs secreted.” To save 1,000, it definitely seems plausible to kill the tourist and take his organs, which violates the constraint placed by the modified principle. However, you could have the following reasonable objection: that the modified principle could theoretically strike a tradeoff between the amount of moral goodness preserved, and the strictness of the Y constraint, and thus in extremes like this, the amount of moral goodness to be preserved by killing the tourist is of such high value that the Y constraint can safely fail in this case, without breaking the modified principle. This certainly holds weight, as if we reduced 1,000 people to just two people, it is not clear that killing the tourist should be permissible. Put differently, we have cheaply taken advantage of the sort of extremism that can make reasonable philosophical arguments crumble. For instance, a reasonable-sounding principle like “Killing a baby is morally wrong” can be made to sound implausible by invoking extremes such as “What if the baby would end up as Hitler, or worse”. Hence, if our modified principle can be allowed to account for extremes, we need a hyp othetical example in which the scenarios don’t push the principle to its extremity and force the Y constraint to fail. I try to do this with a third attempt at a reasonable hypothetical situation that invalidates the modified principle. To construct one, I will attempt to take advantage of the similarities between the train variant and the organ variant. The modification will certainly sound (and be) absurd, but it suffices. Suppose as usual that the train were coming at high speed toward five rail- bound people. Suppose however that instead of a switch, I have a button, which when pushed, transports a random person in the world, say Eric, toward me, rips out his organs, and flings these organs toward the train in such a way that the train derails and crashes, killing no one. Eric of course dies. It is not clear to me that the pushing the button is morally impermissible, but doing so would violate the modified principle on basis of the Y constraint. If you find this logic fishy, then perhaps you are inclined to think that pushing the button is impermissible, which preserves the Y constraint (since then, you are not harvesting the organs of some innocent fellow), and keeps the modified principle intact. However, this case seems too closely similar to the train variant, whose intuition suggested that pulling the switch (and analogously, pushing the button) was the right call to make. It thus seems that there is no clear moral principle to account for all three variants, and more generally, the life-rationing problem, but I think we can come up with a theory, not strictly moral, that can account for all three of them. This is in fact a theory we have actually assumed accounted for all three of them so far, one we have based our search for a satisfactory moral principle on: the perceptiveness of our intuition. Intuition and self-preservation Thus far, we relied on the fact that our intuitions reacted positively to the train and scarce medicine variants, and negatively to the organ variant to guide our search for moral principles. Does this suggest that we can somehow rely on it even further for a more definitive explanation? The most crucial problem with such an attempt however, is the problem of self- preservation, in which the results of our intuition when self-preservation is a factor are at odds with the results when it isn’t a factor, all other things being equal. For instance, logic dictates that any principle which accounts for choosing 5 over 1 in the scarce medicine variant, prima facie, should operate independently of their identity (and moreso be directed by their characteristics). In particular, if we gave them the same general features, then the choice to make might have to be, in part at least, a game of numbers, which the maximum goodness (and modified) principle harken to. Our intuition supports this…until we are the ones at risk. Suppose in the scarce medicine variant, you were the one person who had to receive the large dose while five others died. The intuitive reaction to such a problem would be to preserve yourself, to want the large dose regardless of the five. Even if you’re hard-pressed to believe you would make such a selfishâ€"but perhaps not irrationalâ€"choice, there are statistics that shed illuminating light on this. For instance, a Time psychology article reported on results of a survey of 147 people asked about a slight variation of the train problem. 90% of them responded intuitively that they would pull the switch, but only about one-third of them would pull if the one person on the rail was someone loved (an extension of self-preservation). This suggests that any accounting principle should be developed independently of intuition, but this is to ignore the role intuition played in directing our search for such principles, as well as the role intuition plays in even more general moral principles. A simple example, which might at first seem counterintuitive, is to suppose that an alien colony exactly like Earth has to either destroy Earth, or be destroyed by Earth. Despite the self-preservation component of intuition, I don’t think we would deem it intuitively clear that the moral option to take is to destroy the colony (although this might certainly be the case). Even more concretely, if you were newly added to the waiting list for an organ you desperately need, and were bumped 100 spots ahead, jumping over others who had been waiting for years on the sole basis that whoever calls the shots is romantically interested in you, it is intuitive that the moral option to take is to reject such a move, even at the detriment o f self-preservation. Thus, intuition is not a strictly moral dictator as, with the organ variant case, it can push toward you taking the large dose, but it isn’t morally blind either, and seems to be a driving force for a lot of our moral principles. Earlier, I mentioned a moral system X that might be necessary in determining the relative moral weights of people in either scenario of a life-rationing problem. It seems that were we tasked to develop such a system, we would rely very strongly on the measure of our intuition. To then summarize, a careful and diligent search for a moral principle that accounts for the three variants of the life-rationing problem failed to yield such a principle. It is quite likely that there are things we overlooked, more corners to be excavated, more arguments to be strengthened. On the other hand, it seems that we do not strictly require this moral principle to exist. Our intuition seems to possess some degree of moral aptitude, and in so far as moral principles exist to direct moral actions, such as what decision to make in a life-rationing problem, then thoughtful reliance on this intuition could be a very rational way to go. ** An Elegant Response Finally, to close off, I would like to present the most elegant solution to the train variant Ive ever seen:

The Life Rationing Problem

The Life Rationing Problem Introduction: Keeping up with political news this month has, paradoxically, become a rather depressing pastime of mine. Sometimes, its fun to vanish into a world somewhat tangential to reality, somewhat well-defined, somewhat abstract, and entirely distracting. This is a more fleshed out version of a powerpoint literary presentation I gave at Alpha Delta Phi a while ago. So without further ado (keeping in mind that this is all very theoretical and somewhat subjective), lets dive in, shall we? We will examine scenarios in which some life must be lost, (a more specific case of the general rationing problem in which some people must lose out on what is being rationed) and will argue for how to resolve the life allocation problem ethically. In particular, we will argue that there is likely no rigorous moral principle that completely solves the problem, but that we can strongly depend on the moral measure of intuition to arrive at a solution. Careful Formulation To begin, we will attempt to find a moral principle that solves the problem. If such a principle exists, it should be able to account for differing intuitions in variants of the life-rationing problem. Suppose we simplistically define the problem as, “Given two scenarios, either of which will result in loss of life, what scenario is the more moral option to choose?” The problem is not very interesting, prima facie, if each scenario results in equalâ€"say 1â€"loss of life. Without further facts, we will be unable to make a meaningful decision. Is this true if we extend the situation to an unequal loss of lives depending on the scenario? Our intuition will be to simply pick the scenario that saves the greatest number of lives, a utilitarian approach at heart, but we will show this is not so straightforward by formulating two variants of the problem: The Organ Variant: Five people need organs or they will die. A doctor decides to grab a healthy patient who shows up for a checkup. He takes the patient’s organs and saves the five with them. The Scarce Medicine Variant: Five sick people each need a small dose of medicine or they will die. One other sick person needs a large dose of this medicine or will die as well. The doctor chooses to give the five the small doses rather than the one the large dose. We intuitively find the organ variant morally impermissible, and the scarce medicine variant morally permissible, despite their equal life-saving outcome. Thus our original moral intuition that we simply pick the case that saves more peopleâ€"call this the maximum principleâ€" requires refining. Saving the moral good The first important thing about the maximum principle is that it operates independently of the specifics of the scenarios, and thus doesn’t care enough about certain properties. What might it care more about, to be more effective? To see this, let’s consider the original uninteresting case where either scenario results in loss of precisely one life. The maximum principle will be unable to choose one over the other in this case. In particular, choosing one life over another will require a concept of deservednessâ€"one person deserving to live over the otherâ€"that the maximum principle doesn’t account for. Ethically, the only way the principle might possess a principle of deservedness were if it could give one person greater weight over the other. It seems plausible that such a weight would have to be a moral one. If one scenario involved saving a hardened murderer, the other a humanitarian, then the case seems clearer. Thus, for the maximum principle to be effective in cases of equality, we might refine it to the maximum goodness principle, which calls for the scenario that saves the maximum number of morally good people. In the humanitarian versus murderer situation, the result of this principle is certainly intuitively pleasing. It is also pleasing in the scarce medicine variant. In particular, we will have to assume a sort of equal morality among all people involved, in the absence of any other information, and thus saving the five instead of the one, saves five morally good people as opposed to one morally good person, which satisfies the maximum goodness principle. If however, these five were hardened murderers, and the one was a humanitarian, it doesn’t seem morally repugnant to save the one over the five. There are however three problems with this principle. Firstly, it requires that we have an independent system of morality, wherein moral goodness and badness can be defined and assigned. I claim this is necessary howeverâ€"in particular, if we are to prefer saving a person over another in a morally-directed life-rationing problem, a relevant weighting to consider seems to be their individual moralities. The problem of course is that we assume positive morality is an inherently good thing, but there is no truly universal system for gauging which actions are morally positive, and thus which kind of people are morally positive. To not be bogged down by this, we will have to grant the existence of some morally sound system, X, which simultaenously enforces and black-boxes (i.e. hides the internal workings of) moral weightings. Secondly, there is a convincing argument that can be made for the concept of moral luck, wherein a person’s moral rightness or wrongness might be entirely out of their handsâ€"perhaps a result of genetics or a terrible upbringing, and thus scenarios which necessarily work against them, such as the maximum goodness principle, form a system of double injusticeâ€"punishing a person even more for an already bad situation they are unable to control. However, there are two alternatives: choosing the morally positive person to die, which forces the same problem of punishing a person for a situation they are unable to control, and choosing randomly, which might be possible, but turns a blind eye to the significance of positive morality over negative morality. In particular, the existence of moral luck does not mitigate the expected negative consequences associated with a morally repugnant person, and it seems plausible to save the morally positive person, simply because of the value placed on moral positivity, a value that should be independent of moral luck. Finally, and crucially, the maximum goodness principle does not account for the organ variant. In particular, it would require that we kill the one healthy patient to save the five, if prima facie, we assume equal morality among everyone. But this is intuitively unappealing. Even more problematically, supposing the one patient whose organs we choose to harvest was to some slight degree more morally repugnant than the other five patients, we still find it intuitively problematic to kill him and take his organs. This suggests that the maximum goodness principle must be further refined. A similar scenario To make any potential moral principles we come up with even more appealing, we will bring up a third and popular variant of the life-rationing problem: The Train/Trolley Variant: Five people are bound to a rail, and an incoming train approaches. You stand nearby, and hold a switch which if pulled, directs the train to a different rail, which happens to have one person on it. You pull the switch anyway, saving five to kill the one. This seems morally permissible, and is in line with the result of the maximum goodness principle. However, note the similarity of the train variant with the organ variant. In both instances, ?Five people are in danger of death on the one hand. ?On the other hand, one person is not strictly in danger of death. ?If you do nothing, this one person survives. ?If you perform an action (*), you save the five. What makes the difference then is this action (*), despite these glaring similarities. In one case, you pull a switch. In the other, you harvest the organs. Thus, whatever moral principle may account for these intuitionsâ€"and whatever refinement our maximum goodness principle makesâ€"must be dependent solely on some property of these actions. What could this property be? Three candidates come to mind. 1)There is a moral distinction between killing a person (by collecting their organs) and letting them die (by pulling the switch). 2)Killing the patient involves introducing a new threat to him, whereas pulling the switch only redirects an existing threat. 3)Killing the patient involves a severity of action that affects our sensibilities. Pulling a switch is less macabre. We account for each of these theories in turn. The one person bound to the other rail in the train variant could plausibly attack (1) by insisting that pulling the switch is necessarily a killing action. They can plausibly insist that pulling the switch can’t quite be thought to be letting die, because they don’t die if you don’t pull the switch, and it is your action that is strictly responsible for their deathâ€"a marked distinction from, say, letting a “Do Not Resuscitate” patient die by doing nothingâ€"in which your inaction allows their death. This insistent life-frightened person could similarly attack (2) by analogous argument: that there is no threat to their lives, and that you knowingly introduce this threat by pulling the switch, and directing the train toward them. In the absence of the pulled switch, there is a complete absence of threats. As for (3), one would have to examine exactly what the grimness or macabre nature of the death has to say about the morality of the cause of death. In particular, if we say that the doctor who kills his patient has done something so reprehensible, we are in effect saying one of two things: a) that the manner by which he killed his patient is reprehensible or b) that the very act of killing his patient is reprehensible. Of course, we are trying to figure out what about killing the patient is so intuitively disturbing, and thus b) makes our argument circular, by claiming that killing the patient is what makes killing the patient reprehensible. On the other hand, a) redirects our question elsewhere, as we are concerned with the very nature of the killing, rather than the mechanics of the act itself. To see this, observe that if we know that pulling the switch will cause the train to have a greater impact on the one person it hitsâ€"inflicting a bloody and painful death worse than would be felt by the patient whose organ is harvestedâ€"it doesn’t change the result of our intuition that we should pull the switch (supposing not pulling still kills the five). Thus, the severity of death is independent of the problem we are trying to solve. We have thus considered three rather plausible theories, but none of them have failed to account for the three variants of the life-rationing problem, which would make us seem closer to the thesis statement of this blogpost. I claim we should not give up quite so easily. In particular, we will now proceed by supposing that there is indeed some unknown refinement we can make to the maximum goodness principle that can account for all three variants. We already established that such a refinement must depend on some property of the action performed, and thus we have a new principle, the modified principle: “the scenario to choose is the one that maximizes the moral goodness saved, subject to some constraint Y.” The modified principle can account for all three variants: the maximum goodness portion of it can account for our intuitions in the train and scarce medicine variant, whereas the “constraint Y” portion of it can account for why we don’t harvest the organs of an innocent personâ€"because such an action disobeys the Y constraint. This is, for now at least, the best we can do, supposing we can find Y. However, we could at this point spend our effort producing a counterexample to the modified principle, despite the vagueness of Y. How can we accomplish such a task? Well, observe that the modified principle does make a statement: it places a constraint on a specific actionâ€"harvesting the organs of a healthy patient against their will to save othersâ€"and thus, it suffices to come up with a hypothetical situation in which this seemingly awful action is certainly permissible. Three attempts We could be heinously unfair, and say: “How about if you had to choose between forcibly harvesting the organs of five people, versus harvesting the organs of one?” In this case, the prima facie morally plausible action to take is to forcibly harvest the organs of one person, but when either choice forces the Y-violating action, we are being deliberately obtuse. Thus, we must model a situation in which one action to take is the organ harvesting one, but the other option to take preserves the vagueness of Y, and is not necessarily in violation of it, and yet the better action to take would violate Y. This second attempt could go along the lines of: “Suppose you had a town of 1,000 people, all of whom have mistakenly ingested some deadly poison. Suppose a tourist mistakenly swallowed the only cure, thinking it were a piece of fruit. However, this cure can be extracted if this tourist was killed, and the liquids of his organs secreted.” To save 1,000, it definitely seems plausible to kill the tourist and take his organs, which violates the constraint placed by the modified principle. However, you could have the following reasonable objection: that the modified principle could theoretically strike a tradeoff between the amount of moral goodness preserved, and the strictness of the Y constraint, and thus in extremes like this, the amount of moral goodness to be preserved by killing the tourist is of such high value that the Y constraint can safely fail in this case, without breaking the modified principle. This certainly holds weight, as if we reduced 1,000 people to just two people, it is not clear that killing the tourist should be permissible. Put differently, we have cheaply taken advantage of the sort of extremism that can make reasonable philosophical arguments crumble. For instance, a reasonable-sounding principle like “Killing a baby is morally wrong” can be made to sound implausible by invoking extremes such as “What if the baby would end up as Hitler, or worse”. Hence, if our modified principle can be allowed to account for extremes, we need a hyp othetical example in which the scenarios don’t push the principle to its extremity and force the Y constraint to fail. I try to do this with a third attempt at a reasonable hypothetical situation that invalidates the modified principle. To construct one, I will attempt to take advantage of the similarities between the train variant and the organ variant. The modification will certainly sound (and be) absurd, but it suffices. Suppose as usual that the train were coming at high speed toward five rail- bound people. Suppose however that instead of a switch, I have a button, which when pushed, transports a random person in the world, say Eric, toward me, rips out his organs, and flings these organs toward the train in such a way that the train derails and crashes, killing no one. Eric of course dies. It is not clear to me that the pushing the button is morally impermissible, but doing so would violate the modified principle on basis of the Y constraint. If you find this logic fishy, then perhaps you are inclined to think that pushing the button is impermissible, which preserves the Y constraint (since then, you are not harvesting the organs of some innocent fellow), and keeps the modified principle intact. However, this case seems too closely similar to the train variant, whose intuition suggested that pulling the switch (and analogously, pushing the button) was the right call to make. It thus seems that there is no clear moral principle to account for all three variants, and more generally, the life-rationing problem, but I think we can come up with a theory, not strictly moral, that can account for all three of them. This is in fact a theory we have actually assumed accounted for all three of them so far, one we have based our search for a satisfactory moral principle on: the perceptiveness of our intuition. Intuition and self-preservation Thus far, we relied on the fact that our intuitions reacted positively to the train and scarce medicine variants, and negatively to the organ variant to guide our search for moral principles. Does this suggest that we can somehow rely on it even further for a more definitive explanation? The most crucial problem with such an attempt however, is the problem of self- preservation, in which the results of our intuition when self-preservation is a factor are at odds with the results when it isn’t a factor, all other things being equal. For instance, logic dictates that any principle which accounts for choosing 5 over 1 in the scarce medicine variant, prima facie, should operate independently of their identity (and moreso be directed by their characteristics). In particular, if we gave them the same general features, then the choice to make might have to be, in part at least, a game of numbers, which the maximum goodness (and modified) principle harken to. Our intuition supports this…until we are the ones at risk. Suppose in the scarce medicine variant, you were the one person who had to receive the large dose while five others died. The intuitive reaction to such a problem would be to preserve yourself, to want the large dose regardless of the five. Even if you’re hard-pressed to believe you would make such a selfishâ€"but perhaps not irrationalâ€"choice, there are statistics that shed illuminating light on this. For instance, a Time psychology article reported on results of a survey of 147 people asked about a slight variation of the train problem. 90% of them responded intuitively that they would pull the switch, but only about one-third of them would pull if the one person on the rail was someone loved (an extension of self-preservation). This suggests that any accounting principle should be developed independently of intuition, but this is to ignore the role intuition played in directing our search for such principles, as well as the role intuition plays in even more general moral principles. A simple example, which might at first seem counterintuitive, is to suppose that an alien colony exactly like Earth has to either destroy Earth, or be destroyed by Earth. Despite the self-preservation component of intuition, I don’t think we would deem it intuitively clear that the moral option to take is to destroy the colony (although this might certainly be the case). Even more concretely, if you were newly added to the waiting list for an organ you desperately need, and were bumped 100 spots ahead, jumping over others who had been waiting for years on the sole basis that whoever calls the shots is romantically interested in you, it is intuitive that the moral option to take is to reject such a move, even at the detriment o f self-preservation. Thus, intuition is not a strictly moral dictator as, with the organ variant case, it can push toward you taking the large dose, but it isn’t morally blind either, and seems to be a driving force for a lot of our moral principles. Earlier, I mentioned a moral system X that might be necessary in determining the relative moral weights of people in either scenario of a life-rationing problem. It seems that were we tasked to develop such a system, we would rely very strongly on the measure of our intuition. To then summarize, a careful and diligent search for a moral principle that accounts for the three variants of the life-rationing problem failed to yield such a principle. It is quite likely that there are things we overlooked, more corners to be excavated, more arguments to be strengthened. On the other hand, it seems that we do not strictly require this moral principle to exist. Our intuition seems to possess some degree of moral aptitude, and in so far as moral principles exist to direct moral actions, such as what decision to make in a life-rationing problem, then thoughtful reliance on this intuition could be a very rational way to go. ** An Elegant Response Finally, to close off, I would like to present the most elegant solution to the train variant Ive ever seen:

Essay on The Importance of Vacations from Work - 674 Words

A typical day in a businessman’s life involves waking up early, grabbing a coffee, racing to the office, and working long stressful hours. Even once he makes it home that night his work usually comes with him via blackberry. Family time is most likely limited to the weekends. Even then, he might still be busy on his phone or checking his emails. Taking a break from such a life by sitting on the beach or touring the world or even sitting at home can have a major effect on your life. People don’t realize how stressful and damaging life can be without vacations. Taking annual vacations are vital to living a healthy and productive life. Life without vacations is a life that many people live with numerous excuses to support their lifestyle†¦show more content†¦Statistics on men also show that those who don’t take vacations frequently have a fifty percent greater chance â€Å"of dying from a heart attack† than those who do vacation more often (Barker, 2 009). Is it worth it to work those extra two weeks a year and risk having a heart attack? Work can be stressful, and constant stress can negatively affect your health. Taking a break from this can only positively affect you. Once a person is taking a vacation it has to be done correctly. By taking along a blackberry or laptop you are gaining absolutely nothing. A vacation is a break from everyday life. Its goal is to escape the stressful components of working. By taking work along with you, you’re defeating the whole purpose. Researchers in Austria found that in an average-sized company fifty-three employees reported â€Å"fewer physical complaints, improved sleep and better mood during vacation as compared to a regular workweek† (Barker, 2009). Aside from the fact that vacations improve your health, it also improves your productivity. People are afraid to take off from work; they think it will lead their employers to question how committed they are to their jobs. In r eality, people are more productive and creative when they come back from vacation. People are also less likely to experience burnout if they vacation frequently (Anonymous, 2007). If people say they can’t afford a vacation, it doesn’t necessarily mean that. They might have the money for it but wouldShow MoreRelatedBenifits of Foreign Travel1674 Words   |  7 Pages [Attention Getter] Taking a vacation is on everybody’s to do list but according to a study conducted by the Families and Work Institute only about half of Americans use their full 2 weeks of vacation each year. [Motivate audience to listen] I found this odd, but when I examined my own life I found I haven’t taken an actual vacation in over 10 years. [Credibility]It just something I’ve always seemed to brush off by saying â€Å"Oh well, I’ll just take a nice vacation next year, but the following yearRead MoreBatna Case Study1489 Words   |  6 Pagesin order of importance. 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Traders Joe’s also recruits people with the effective managerial skills which are the combinationRead MoreLeadership Analysis : Marriott Aruba882 Words   |  4 PagesAccording to Yukl (Yukl, 2013) one of the many definitions of leadership is â€Å"the ability of an individual to influence, motivate, and enable other to contribute toward the effectiveness and success of the organization†. Therefore it is of importance to have an effective leader in an organization to guide the company in the correct direction, in order to achieve the company’s’ main goal. The purpose of this paper is to perform an analysis on the leadership situation within Marriott Aruba. This leadershipRead MorePrinciples Of Stratification On Society1547 Words   |  7 Pagesthem to work harder and more efficiently with the hopes of gaining access to higher social classes or positions. For example, you can compare this idea to work and seniority: Cashiers at a grocery store may work harder and do their best at their job to show their bosses that they deserve a raise and/or to be promoted to a higher position such as a manager. Davis and Moore also argue that the positions within the highest rank and best rewards are the ones which â€Å"a) have the greatest importance for theRead MoreAmerican School Districts Should Implement A Longer School Year1246 Words   |  5 Pagesdebate over whether or not American school districts should implement a longer school year. This would mean taking a month away from summer vacation, which is regularly over two months. It is con troversial because some argue that it would take away from family time and that school districts simply cannot afford to do it. Although most children would prefer more vacation time, a longer school year would tremendously benefit them in the imminent future. A longer school year would develop disciplineRead MoreMy Vacation - Original Vacation1472 Words   |  6 Pageswas a child, every summer the majority of my friends would go on vacations. Some would go down to the Lake of the Ozarks or halfway across the county to New York or California. They would get the opportunity to do unique activities such as bungee jumping, skydiving or scuba diving. I was constantly envious of them because I always imagined having a family vacation which I felt was never going to happen. Having a week or so away from the house and the opportunity to do activities I have never done

Essay about Empiricist vs. Rationalist - 901 Words

Empiricist philosophers such as John Locke believe that knowledge must come from experience. Others philosophers such as Descartes believe that knowledge is innate; this way of thinking is used by rationalist. In this paper I will discuss the difference between Descartes rationalism in his essays The Meditations and Lockes empiricism in his essays An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. I will then lend my understanding as to what I believe as the ultimate source of knowledge. Locke discards the suggestion of innate ideas. Locke believes that if we always had innate ideas, it would be impossible for us not to perceive or be aware of them. He believes that if there were innate ideas then they would be universal ideas present†¦show more content†¦Descartes as a rationalist believes that knowledge comes from the mind alone. During the First Meditation, Descartes came to the conclusion that there must be some kind of evil deceiver that leads him to a state of doubt (Descartes 77). Descartes starts out with the fact that distant sensations are subject to doubt and uncertainty. He then goes on to try and cast doubt onto close sensations. Descartes starts off by stating that close sense perception must be certain because we are not crazy, and only a insane person would doubt what was right in front of them. Descartes then uses the dream argument to cast uncertainty on close sense perception because they are as lively, vivid and clear as reality is when we are awake (Descartes 76). Descartes then states that geometry and math are certain. For whether I am awake or sleeping, two and three added together always make five, and a square never has more than four sides; and it does not seem possible that truths so apparent can be suspected of any falsity or uncertainty (Descartes 98). Descartes comes to realize this certainty because math, geometry, and the simple sciences can be understood and proved through logic and reasoning. He then uses his Deceiver Argument to cast doubt on close sensations. He questions how we know for certain that God is good, and how we know thatShow MoreRelatedDescartes vs. Locke1175 Words   |  5 PagesPhilosophy Essay (Descartes vs. Locke) Socrates once said, â€Å"As for me, all I know is that I know nothing.† Several philosophers contradicted Socrates’ outlook and believed that true knowledge was in fact attainable. This epistemological view however had several stances to it, as philosophers held different beliefs in regards to the derivation of true knowledge. Rationalists believed that the mind was the source of true knowledge, while in Empiricism, true knowledge derived from the senses. ReneRead MoreDescartes vs Locke Essay1191 Words   |  5 PagesPhilosophy Essay (Descartes vs. Locke) Socrates once said, â€Å"As for me, all I know is that I know nothing.† Several philosophers contradicted Socrates’ outlook and believed that true knowledge was in fact attainable. 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Locke s Empiricism Essay1632 Words   |  7 PagesPhilosophy Name Institution INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY Cartesian rationalism vs. Locke’s empiricism Rene Descartes was a rationalist who believed that knowledge of the world can be gained by the exercise of pure reason, while empiricist like Locke believed that knowledge of the world came through senses. Descartes from his meditations deduced from intuitive first principles the existence of self, of God,Read MoreLocke’s Qualities vs. Berkeley’s Idealism754 Words   |  4 PagesLocke’s Qualities vs. Berkeley’s Idealism In the modern period of philosophy, around the 16th and 17th century, after the fall of Rome and the rise of the dark years, three major events had occurred. The first began with the scientific revolution, where many philosophers were becoming scientist, such as the philosopher of science Francis Bacon. The next event was the resurgence of skepticism, where one questions everything until they discover the truth. 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As the film opens we are introduced to each character and their current spouse. All seems to be well other than the normal husband vs. in law rivalry, some may say that portrayal of life seems reasonable. What we find out as the film progresses is that the problems within these couples goes deeper than the traditional family feud. The main character Judah is having an affair with

Background of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Essay - 2077 Words

Background of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was published in 1886 and is one of the best known of Stevensons novels. It concerns the way in which an individual is made up of contrary emotions and desires: some good and some evil. Through the curiosity of Utterson, a lawyer, we learn of the ugly and violent Mr Hyde and his odd connection to the respectable Dr Jekyll who pays out a cheque for Hydes despicable behaviour. A brutal murder follows. The dead man is one of Uttersons clients, Sir Danvers Carew. The murder weapon was, unbelievably a cane†¦show more content†¦Originally, the tale was a straightforward horror story, with no allegorical undertones. After reading the original version to his wife, however, she suggested that more could be done with the story and after initially resisting, Stevenson burned the initial manuscript. The rewriting of the new Jekyll and Hyde took a scant three days. Immediately upon its publication in January of 1887, it was recognized as a grand work. An anonymous review in The Times praised the book highly, observing that Nothing Mr. Stevenson has written as yet has so strongly impressed us with the versatility of his very original genius, concluding with the plea that the story should be read as finished study in the art of fantastic literature. Critics claim that Dr. Jekyll was the first time Stevenson sustained a full-length narrative that was not only exciting, but also a well-composed story with a powerful parable. The Strange Case of Mr. Jekyll and Hyde is a book based on Robert Louis Stevensons own experiences, especially with middle-age men in Edinburghand London (this, therefore, is one of the explanations of a lack of female writers). He focused on a milieu he knew well: the clubby, middle-class world of powerful men. And what he knew best about that milieu becomes the driving force of the novel it was a world in which faÃÆ' §ade countedShow MoreRelatedAn Atmosphere of Mystery and Suspense in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde1352 Words   |  6 PagesAn Atmosphere of Mystery and Suspense in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde During the Nineteenth century, horror stories were getting more popular than ever. Several distinctive horror stories, like Dracula, Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are still known today. These stories were not set in busy countries, but written as happening in Transylvania, Switzerland, the Arctic, and other far away and little known countries. The setting links to some peculiarRead MoreEssay about Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde1188 Words   |  5 PagesDr Jekyll and Mr Hyde This novel is more than just a traditional horror story as it has many hidden and complex meanings and explanations, of what seem and would have normally before this book, been simple events. Stevenson has very strong opinions and some are expressed in the book. A traditional horror story would either be a super natural In this novel Stevensons characters, Jekyll and Hyde, are stereotypes of people who are good and evil. The good is the friendly doctor (theRead MoreCharacter Analysis On Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde.Jean Paul1213 Words   |  5 PagesCharacter Analysis on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Jean Paul Richter defines doppelgà ¤ngers as â€Å"people who see themselves.† One would think that such would be the case for the two main characters in the book The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, but it is quite the opposite (until the end of the novel when the reader finds out that the two main characters are in fact one). Dr. Jekyll creates Mr. Hyde in the hopes of expelling evilness and temptation from himself,Read MoreThe Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde1577 Words   |  7 PagesStevenson’s legendary novella, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, is relatively well known. A scientist, Dr. Henry Jekyll, tries to separate his inner good from evil and ends up with an alter ego, Edward Hyde. While Hyde, he commits numerous atrocities, including trampling a child and beating Sir Danvers Carew to death with a walking stick. The story is mostly written from the point of view of Mr. Gabriel Utterson, a lawyer who is friends with Jekyll and eventually pieces together the mystery ofRead MoreAlice s Adventures And The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde1050 Words   |  5 PagesVictorian era has released some of the most well known books known to date. Based on their background and the time period they grew up, authors from the Victorian era had to mask their work within stories with characters who go on grand adventures or experiences a sense of freedom. This can be seen in two novels, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, written by Lewis Carroll, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, written by Robert Lewis Stevenson. The two books are a good representation of madnessRead MoreStevensons Representation of Good and Evil in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde1522 Words   |  7 PagesCase of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde In this piece of coursework, I am asked to first of all, discuss how the novel is mainly concerned with the struggle between good and evil. Next, I will be moving on to discovering the historical, social, and cultural issues of the novel; this will discus what Stevensons literary influences were. Subsequently, I will be exploring the actual evil character oh Mr. Edward Hyde; this will include a character description of Hyde. Then, IRead MoreGood Vs Evil : Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde1724 Words   |  7 Pagesbut instead the mirror hails Snow White. Then, the Queen transforms into a witch in order to be the fairest of them all, similar to the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde transformation. Dr. Jekyll transforms to Mr. Hyde in order to change identities. Both stories, share the idea of dualism or the idea of being two different people and both characters, the Queen and Dr. Jekyll, have one side presenting good acts, and other side presenting evil acts. These stories are also similar because they both written inRead MoreDr Jekyll And Mr Hyde Duality Essay1502 Words   |  7 PagesIn the novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson provides insight into the inner workings of the duality that exists within humans. 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