SUBJECT

FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS IN ETHICS (C 211 COG)

1. HOW DO YOU COMPARE THE ETHICS OF SOCRATES OF ETHICS OFPLATO

WHO IS MORE ACCEPTABLE TO YOU
When looking at virtue, both Plato and Aristotle start with the views of what counted as virtues
in Greek society. The virtues Aristotle lists in the Nichomachean Ethics are derived from this,
as are the virtues that Plato focuses on in many of his dialogues (but most famously, the
Republic). Foremost for both were wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice, though Aristotle
meant much further in delimiting them.

For both Plato and Aristotle, and indeed for most Greeks, virtue was essential for happiness
(eudaimonia, which means "happiness" or "good character," more broadly self-fulfillment or the
good life).
A key difference arises when it comes to how we acquire those virtues. 1) Plato seems to have
held what we'd call a Socratic conception of virtue (acquired from his teacher, Socrates) that
knowledge is virtue. In other words, to know the good is to do the good. 2) This means that all
the virtues boil down to wisdom. If I'm really wise, all the other virtues will follow. Plato, in
other words, believed in the unity of the virtues. Socrates was the best example of this for
Plato, as his dialogues illustrate. 3) Finally, Plato believed that virtue was sufficient for
happiness --- there is no such thing as moral luck.
Aristotle differed on each of these points. 1) Knowing the good wasn't enough for Aristotle.
Although Aristotle doesn't necessarily have a concept of a free will (this is a later, largely
Christian idea), he does believe that I need to practice virtue --- that I need to habituate myself
to virtue in order to truly be virtuous. 2) For this reason, although wisdom is the highest form
of virtue, it is by no means the key to possessing all virtues. In other words, Aristotle denies the
unity of the virtues. 3) Finally, Aristotle thinks that although virtue is necessary to the good
life, it isn't sufficient. That is to say, I can be virtuous but still unhappy (think of Oedipus). In
particular, if I need good fellow citizens to truly achieve happiness.
Interestingly, Aristotle's views on all these points represented the more mainstream views of
Greek society, whereas Plato's were more radical.
At the most general difference, Aristotle and Plato placed different values on the human being.
Whereas Aristotle generally saw the positives in society, and therefore prescribed freedom and
equality, Plato saw the negatives and prescribed various illiberal and discriminatory ideals.

2. If Jesus loves the poor, does it follow that Jesus hates the rich, why?
Jesus comes to seek and to save that which was lost. In an occasion, "Jesus entered Jericho and
was passing through. A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector
and was wealthy. He wanted to see who Jesus was, but because he was short he could not see
over the crowd. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was
coming that way. When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, Zacchaeus,
come down immediately. I must stay at your house today. So he came down at once and
welcomed him gladly. All the people saw this and began to mutter, He has gone to be the
guest of a sinner. But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, Look, Lord! Here and now I
give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will
pay back four times the amount. Jesus said to him, Today salvation has come to this house,
because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the
lost.
In the bible, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Job, Solomon and Davidthey were all rich men, and
loved by God. They were called the man after Gods own heart.
Jesus loves people, rich or poor; but the poor people received the LOVE of Jesus better than the
rich. The rich do not feel their need of anything that is Gods. In Revelation 3:17 the bible
says, Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with good, and have need of nothing; and
knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor , and blind, and naked. It is not a
matter as to the Jesus not loving the rich it is a matter of the people not willing to accept Jesus
love. John 3:16 states Whosoever , Jesus has already made His choice whosoever. It is up
to that individual to accept the love of Jesus.
What Jesus hates are the following, a proud look, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent
blood, heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief, false
witness that speaketh lies, and a person that soweth discord among brethren. Jesus hates a
sinful or self-righteous attitude in anyone. A rich person who did good deed sin the sight of
God and did not put wealth or power ahead of faith and duty, would tend to find favor and not
hatred. All people are loved equally by God regardless of their social standing or bank balance.
What Jesus hates is sin, whether form a poor or wealthy individual. The bible makes the point
that a rich person can have a selfish and proud heart due to their reliance on self and preoccupation with material possessions. It does not, however mean that they are not loved. Many
wealthy person have had a relationship with Jesus Christ. It is what is in their heart that matter
to Jesus.

3. WHAT IS THE PLAC EOF ETHICS IN THE LIFE OF CONTEMPORARY MAN.

Ethics is necessary to contemporary man in most walks of life. Any social activity in which it is
possible to harm another person in some way has rules of behavior which have the purpose of
limiting pain and suffering within the community. Each profession has its own special set of
rules detailing how such a professional should behave as he carries on with his work. These
rules and behaviors are grouped together under the term ethics.
Ethics are in many cases dependent upon the particular people involved. For example, what is
ethical between a husband and wife, might not be ethical between the wife and her doctor or
between the husband and his son's school teacher.
There are innumerable degrees of ethical behavior. In some cases the behaviors are deemed so
important that the society has made them into laws, such as laws against murder.
The more complicated a society, the more complicated are its laws and ethics.

4. JEREMY BENTAHM
Was a British philosopher, jurist, and social reformer. He is regarded as the founder of modern
utilitarianism. Bentham became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a
political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism. He advocated individual
and economic freedom, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights
for women, the right to divorce, and the decriminalising of homosexual acts. He called for the
abolition of slavery, the abolition of the death penalty, and the abolition of physical punishment,
including that of children. He has also become known in recent years as an early advocate of
animal rights.[3] Though strongly in favour of the extension of individual legal rights, he
opposed the idea of natural law and natural rights, calling them "nonsense upon stilts".
He attended Westminster School and, in 1760, at age 12, was sent by his father to The Queen's
College, Oxford, where he completed his Bachelor's degree in 1763 and his Master's degree in
1766. He trained as a lawyer and, though he never practised, was called to the bar in 1769. He
became deeply frustrated with the complexity of the English legal code, which he termed the
"Demon of Chicane".
Among his many proposals for legal and social reform was a design for a prison building he
called the Panopticon. He spent some sixteen years of his life developing and refining his ideas
for the building, and hoped that the government would adopt the plan for a National
Penitentiary, and appoint him as contractor-governor. Although the prison was never built, the
concept had an important influence on later generations of thinkers. Twentieth-century French
philosopher Michel Foucault argued that the Panopticon was paradigmatic of several 19thcentury "disciplinary" institutions.

Bentham became convinced that his plans for the Panopticon had been thwarted by the King
and an aristocratic elite acting in their own interests. It was largely because of his brooding
sense of injustice that he developed his ideas of "sinister interest" that is, of the vested
interests of the powerful conspiring against a wider public interest which underpinned many
of his broader arguments for reform.
Bentham was in correspondence with many influential people. Adam Smith, for example,
opposed free interest rates before he was made aware of Bentham's arguments on the subject.
As a result of his correspondence with Mirabeau and other leaders of the French Revolution,
Bentham was declared an honorary citizen of France. He was an outspoken critic of the
revolutionary discourse of natural rights and of the violence that arose after the Jacobins took
power (1792). Between 1808 and 1810, he held a personal friendship with Latin American
Independence Precursor Francisco de Miranda and paid visits to Miranda's Grafton Way house
in London.
In 1823, he co-founded the Westminster Review with James Mill as a journal for the
"Philosophical Radicals" a group of younger disciples through whom Bentham exerted
considerable influence in British public life. One such young writer was Edwin Chadwick, who
wrote on hygiene, sanitation and policing and was a major contributor to the Poor Law
Amendment Act. Bentham employed him as a secretary and bequeathed him a large legacy.
Works.
Bentham's ambition in life was to create a "Pannomion", a complete utilitarian code of law. He
not only proposed many legal and social reforms, but also expounded an underlying moral
principle on which they should be based. This philosophy of utilitarianism took for its
"fundamental axiom", it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of
right and wrong". Bentham claimed to have borrowed this concept from the writings of Joseph
Priestley, although the closest that Priestley in fact came to expressing it was in the form "the
good and happiness of the members, that is the majority of the members of any state, is the
great standard by which every thing relating to that state must finally be determined".
The "greatest happiness principle", or the principle of utility, forms the cornerstone of all
Bentham's thought. By "happiness", he understood a predominance of "pleasure" over "pain".
He wrote in The Principles of Morals and Legislation:
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.
It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.
On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects,
are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think ...
He also suggested a procedure for estimating the moral status of any action, which he called the
Hedonistic or felicific calculus. Utilitarianism was revised and expanded by Bentham's student

John Stuart Mill. In Mill's hands, "Benthamism" became a major element in the liberal
conception of state policy objectives.
In his exposition of the felicific calculus, Bentham proposed a classification of 12 pains and 14
pleasures, by which we might test the "happiness factor" of any action. Nonetheless, it should
not be overlooked that Bentham's "hedonistic" theory (a term from J.J.C. Smart), unlike Mill's,
is often criticized for lacking a principle of fairness embodied in a conception of justice. In
Bentham and the Common Law Tradition, Gerald J. Postema states: "No moral concept suffers
more at Bentham's hand than the concept of justice. There is no sustained, mature analysis of
the notion..." Thus, some critics object, it would be acceptable to torture one person if this
would produce an amount of happiness in other people outweighing the unhappiness of the
tortured individual. However, as P.J. Kelly argued in Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice:
Jeremy Bentham and the Civil Law, Bentham had a theory of justice that prevented such
consequences. According to Kelly, for Bentham the law "provides the basic framework of social
interaction by delimiting spheres of personal inviolability within which individuals can form
and pursue their own conceptions of well-being". It provides security, a precondition for the
formation of expectations. As the hedonic calculus shows "expectation utilities" to be much
higher than natural ones, it follows that Bentham does not favour the sacrifice of a few to the
benefit of the many.
Bentham's An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation focuses on the principle
of utility and how this view of morality ties into legislative practices. His principle of utility
regards "good" as that which produces the greatest amount of pleasure and the minimum
amount of pain and "evil" as that which produces the most pain without the pleasure. This
concept of pleasure and pain is defined by Bentham as physical as well as spiritual. Bentham
writes about this principle as it manifests itself within the legislation of a society. He lays down
a set of criteria for measuring the extent of pain or pleasure that a certain decision will create.
The criteria are divided into the categories of intensity, duration, certainty, proximity,
productiveness, purity, and extent. Using these measurements, he reviews the concept of
punishment and when it should be used as far as whether a punishment will create more
pleasure or more pain for a society. He calls for legislators to determine whether punishment
creates an even more evil offence. Instead of suppressing the evil acts, Bentham argues that
certain unnecessary laws and punishments could ultimately lead to new and more dangerous
vices than those being punished to begin with, and calls upon legislators to measure the
pleasures and pains associated with any legislation and to form laws in order to create the
greatest good for the greatest number. He argues that the concept of the individual pursuing his
or her own happiness cannot be necessarily declared "right", because often these individual
pursuits can lead to greater pain and less pleasure for a society as a whole. Therefore, the
legislation of a society is vital to maintain the maximum pleasure and the minimum degree of
pain for the greatest number of people.

IMMANUEL KANT
Was a German philosopher who is widely considered to be a central figure of modern
philosophy. He argued that fundamental concepts structure human experience, and that reason
is the source of morality. His thought continues to have a major influence in contemporary
thought, especially the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and
aesthetics. Kant's major work, the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781),[3]
aimed to explain the relationship between reason and human experience. With this project, he
hoped to move beyond what he took to be failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics.
He attempted to put an end to what he considered an era of futile and speculative theories of
human experience, while resisting the skepticism of thinkers such as David Hume.
Kant argued that our experiences are structured by necessary features of our minds. In his view,
the mind shapes and structures experience so that, on an abstract level, all human experience
shares certain essential structural features. Among other things, Kant believed that the concepts
of space and time are integral to all human experience, as are our concepts of cause and effect.
One important consequence of this view is that one never has direct experience of things, the
so-called noumenal world, and that what we do experience is the phenomenal world as
conveyed by our senses. These claims summarize Kant's views upon the subjectobject
problem. Kant published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy,
and history. These included the Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft,
1788), the Metaphysics of Morals (Die Metaphysik der Sitten, 1797), which dealt with ethics,
and the Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790), which looks at aesthetics and
teleology.
Kant aimed to resolve disputes between empirical and rationalist approaches. The former
asserted that all knowledge comes through experience; the latter maintained that reason and
innate ideas were prior. Kant argued that experience is purely subjective without first being
processed by pure reason. He also said that using reason without applying it to experience only
leads to theoretical illusions. The free and proper exercise of reason by the individual was a
theme both of the Age of Enlightenment, and of Kant's approaches to the various problems of
philosophy. His ideas influenced many thinkers in Germany during his lifetime, and he moved
philosophy beyond the debate between the rationalists and empiricists. Kant is seen as a major
figure in the history and development of philosophy.
Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in Knigsberg, Prussia (since 1946 the city of Kaliningrad,
Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia), as the fourth of nine children (four of them reached adulthood).
Baptized 'Emanuel', he changed his name to 'Immanuel' after learning Hebrew. Contrary to a
widespread myth that in his entire life he never traveled more than 10 miles (16 km) from
Knigsberg, he worked between 1750 and 1754 as a "Hauslehrer" (tutor) in Judtschen (now
Veselovka, Russia, approx. 20 km) and in Gro-Arnsdorf (now near Elblg, Poland, approx.
105 km). His father, Johann Georg Kant (16821746), was a German harnessmaker from
Memel, at the time Prussia's most northeastern city (now Klaipda, Lithuania). His mother,
Anna Regina Reuter (16971737), was born in Nuremberg. Kant's paternal grandfather, Hans

Kant,[10] had emigrated from Scotland to East Prussia, and his father still spelled their family
name "Cant". In his youth, Kant was a solid, albeit unspectacular, student. He was brought up in
a Pietist household that stressed intense religious devotion, personal humility, and a literal
interpretation of the Bible. Kant received a stern education strict, punitive, and disciplinary
that preferred Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science. Despite his
upbringing in a religious household and still maintaining a belief in God, he was skeptical of
religion in later life; various commentators have labelled him agnostic. The common myths
concerning Kant's personal mannerisms are enumerated, explained, and refuted in Goldthwait's
introduction to his translation of Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. It is
often held that Kant lived a very strict and predictable life, leading to the oft-repeated story that
neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married, but did not seem to lack
a rewarding social life he was a popular teacher and a modestly successful author even
before starting on his major philosophical works.
Kant is best known for his work in the philosophy of ethics and metaphysics, but he made
significant contributions to other disciplines. He made an important astronomical discovery,
namely a discovery about the nature of the Earth's rotation, for which he won the Berlin
Academy Prize in 1754.
It is often held that Kant was a late developer, that he only became an important philosopher in
his mid-50s after rejecting his earlier views. While it is true that Kant wrote his greatest works
relatively late in life, there is a tendency to underestimate the value of his earlier works. Recent
Kant scholarship has devoted more attention to these "pre-critical" writings and has recognized
a degree of continuity with his mature work.
Kant published a second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft) in
1787, heavily revising the first parts of the book. Most of his subsequent work focused on other
areas of philosophy. He continued to develop his moral philosophy, notably in 1788's Critique
of Practical Reason (known as the second Critique) and 1797's Metaphysics of Morals. The
1790 Critique of Judgment (the third Critique) applied the Kantian system to aesthetics and
teleology.
In 1792, Kant's attempt to publish the Second of the four Pieces of Religion within the Bounds
of Bare Reason, in the journal Berlinische Monatsschrift, met with opposition from the King's
censorship commission, which had been established that same year in the context of the French
Revolution. Kant then arranged to have all four pieces published as a book, routing it through
the philosophy department at the University of Jena to avoid the need for theological
censorship. Kant got a now famous reprimand from the King, for this action of insubordination.
When he nevertheless published a second edition in 1794, the censor was so irate that he
arranged for a royal order that required Kant never to publish or even speak publicly about
religion. Kant then published his response to the King's reprimand and explained himself, in
the preface of The Conflict of the Faculties.

He also wrote a number of semi-popular essays on history, religion, politics and other topics.
These works were well received by Kant's contemporaries and confirmed his preeminent status
in eighteenth century philosophy. There were several journals devoted solely to defending and
criticizing the Kantian philosophy. But despite his success, philosophical trends were moving in
another direction. Many of Kant's most important disciples (including Reinhold, Beck and
Fichte) transformed the Kantian position into increasingly radical forms of idealism. The
progressive stages of revision of Kant's teachings marked the emergence of German Idealism.
Kant opposed these developments and publicly denounced Fichte in an open letter in 1799. It
was one of his final acts expounding a stance on philosophical questions. In 1800 a student of
Kant named Gottlob Benjamin Jsche (17621842) published a manual of logic for teachers
called Logik, which he had prepared at Kant's request. Jsche prepared the Logik using a copy
of a textbook in logic by Georg Freidrich Meier entitled Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre, in which
Kant had written copious notes and annotations. The Logik has been considered of fundamental
importance to Kant's philosophy, and the understanding of it. The great nineteenth century
logician Charles Sanders Peirce remarked, in an incomplete review of Thomas Kingsmill
Abbott's English translation of the introduction to the Logik, that "Kant's whole philosophy
turns upon his logic."[32] Also, Robert Schirokauer Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz, wrote in the
translators' introduction to their English translation of the Logik, "Its importance lies not only in
its significance for the Critique of Pure Reason, the second part of which is a restatement of
fundamental tenets of the Logic, but in its position within the whole of Kant's work."
Kant's health, long poor, took a turn for the worse and he died at Knigsberg on 12 February
1804, uttering "Es ist gut" ("It is good") before expiring.[34] His unfinished final work was
published as Opus Postumum.
Kant wrote a book discussing his theory of virtue in terms of independence which he believed
was a viable modern alternative to more familiar Greek views about virtue. His book is often
criticized because it is written in a hostile manner and fails to articulate his thoughts on
autocracy in a comprehensible manner. In the self-governance model presented by Aristotelian
virtue, the non-rational part of the soul can be brought to listen to reason through training.
Although Kantian self-governance appears to involve a rational crackdown on appetites and
emotions with lack of harmony between reason and emotion, Kantian virtue denies to require
self-conquest, self-suppression, or self-silencing. They dispute that the self-mastery
constitutive of virtue is ultimately mastery over our tendency of will to give priority to appetite
or emotion unregulated by duty, it does not require extirpating, suppressing, or silencing
sensibility in general
In Kant's essay "Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?", Kant defined the
Enlightenment as an age shaped by the Latin motto Sapere aude ("Dare to be wise"). Kant
maintained that one ought to think autonomously, free of the dictates of external authority. His
work reconciled many of the differences between the rationalist and empiricist traditions of the
18th century. He had a decisive impact on the Romantic and German Idealist philosophies of
the 19th century. His work has also been a starting point for many 20th century philosophers.

Kant asserted that, because of the limitations of argumentation in the absence of irrefutable
evidence, no one could really know whether there is a God and an afterlife or not. For the sake
of morality and as a ground for reason, Kant asserted, people are justified in believing in God,
even though they could never know God's presence empirically. He explained:
All the preparations of reason, therefore, in what may be called pure philosophy, are in reality
directed to those three problems only [God, the soul, and freedom]. However, these three
elements in themselves still hold independent, proportional, objective weight individually.
Moreover, in a collective relational context; namely, to know what ought to be done: if the will
is free, if there is a God, and if there is a future world. As this concerns our actions with
reference to the highest aims of life, we see that the ultimate intention of nature in her wise
provision was really, in the constitution of our reason, directed to moral interests only.
The sense of an enlightened approach and the critical method required that "If one cannot prove
that a thing is, he may try to prove that it is not. And if he succeeds in doing neither (as often
occurs), he may still ask whether it is in his interest to accept one or the other of the alternatives
hypothetically, from the theoretical or the practical point of view. Hence the question no longer
is as to whether perpetual peace is a real thing or not a real thing, or as to whether we may not
be deceiving ourselves when we adopt the former alternative, but we must act on the
supposition of its being real."[37] The presupposition of God, soul, and freedom was then a
practical concern, for "Morality, by itself, constitutes a system, but happiness does not, unless it
is distributed in exact proportion to morality. This, however, is possible in an intelligible world
only under a wise author and ruler. Reason compels us to admit such a ruler, together with life
in such a world, which we must consider as future life, or else all moral laws are to be
considered as idle dreams... ."[38]
Kant claimed to have created a "Copernican revolution" in philosophy. This involved two
interconnected foundations of his "critical philosophy":
the epistemology of Transcendental Idealism and
the moral philosophy of the autonomy of practical reason.
These teachings placed the active, rational human subject at the center of the cognitive and
moral worlds. Kant argued that the rational order of the world as known by science was not just
the fortuitous accumulation of sense perceptions.
Conceptual unification and integration is carried out by the mind through concepts or the
"categories of the understanding" operating on the perceptual manifold within space and time.
The latter are not concepts, but are forms of sensibility that are a priori necessary conditions for
any possible experience. Thus the objective order of nature and the causal necessity that
operates within it are dependent upon the mind's processes, the product of the rule-based
activity that Kant called, "synthesis." There is much discussion among Kant scholars on the
correct interpretation of this train of thought.

The 'two-world' interpretation regards Kant's position as a statement of epistemological

limitation, that we are not able to transcend the bounds of our own mind, meaning that we
cannot access the "thing-in-itself". Kant, however, also speaks of the thing in itself or
transcendental object as a product of the (human) understanding as it attempts to conceive of
objects in abstraction from the conditions of sensibility. Following this line of thought, some
interpreters have argued that the thing in itself does not represent a separate ontological domain
but simply a way of considering objects by means of the understanding alone this is known as
the two-aspect view.
The notion of the "thing in itself" was much discussed by those who came after Kant. It was
argued that since the "thing in itself" was unknowable its existence could not simply be
assumed. Rather than arbitrarily switching to an account that was ungrounded in anything
supposed to be the "real," as did the German Idealists, another group arose to ask how our
(presumably reliable) accounts of a coherent and rule-abiding universe were actually grounded.
This new kind of philosophy became known as Phenomenology, and its founder was Edmund
Husserl.
With regard to morality, Kant argued that the source of the good lies not in anything outside the
human subject, either in nature or given by God, but rather is only the good will itself. A good
will is one that acts from duty in accordance with the universal moral law that the autonomous
human being freely gives itself. This law obliges one to treat humanity understood as rational
agency, and represented through oneself as well as others as an end in itself rather than
(merely) as means to other ends the individual might hold. This necessitates practical selfreflection in which we universalize our reasons.
These ideas have largely framed or influenced all subsequent philosophical discussion and
analysis. The specifics of Kant's account generated immediate and lasting controversy.
Nevertheless, his theses that the mind itself necessarily makes a constitutive contribution to its
knowledge, that this contribution is transcendental rather than psychological, that philosophy
involves self-critical activity, that morality is rooted in human freedom, and that to act
autonomously is to act according to rational moral principles have all had a lasting effect on
subsequent philosophy.
Kant defines his theory of perception in his influential 1781 work the Critique of Pure Reason,
which has often been cited as the most significant volume of metaphysics and epistemology in
modern philosophy. Kant maintains that our understanding of the external world had its
foundations not merely in experience, but in both experience and a priori concepts, thus
offering a non-empiricist critique of rationalist philosophy, which is what he and others
referred to as his "Copernican revolution".
Firstly, Kant's distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions:
1. Analytic proposition: a proposition whose predicate concept is contained in its subject
concept; e.g., "All bachelors are unmarried," or, "All bodies take up space."

2. Synthetic proposition: a proposition whose predicate concept is not contained in its

subject concept; e.g., "All bachelors are happy," or, "All bodies have weight."
Analytic propositions are true by nature of the meaning of the words involved in the sentence
we require no further knowledge than a grasp of the language to understand this proposition.
On the other hand, synthetic statements are those that tell us something about the world. The
truth or falsehood of synthetic statements derives from something outside of their linguistic
content. In this instance, weight is not a necessary predicate of the body; until we are told the
heaviness of the body we do not know that it has weight. In this case, experience of the body is
required before its heaviness becomes clear. Before Kant's first Critique, empiricists (cf. Hume)
and rationalists (cf. Leibniz) assumed that all synthetic statements required experience to be
known.
Kant, however, contests this: he claims that elementary mathematics, like arithmetic, is
synthetic a priori, in that its statements provide new knowledge, but knowledge that is not
derived from experience. This becomes part of his over-all argument for transcendental
idealism. That is, he argues that the possibility of experience depends on certain necessary
conditions which he calls a priori forms and that these conditions structure and hold true
of the world of experience. In so doing, his main claims in the "Transcendental Aesthetic" are
that mathematic judgments are synthetic a priori and in addition, that Space and Time are not
derived from experience but rather are its preconditions.
Once we have grasped the concepts of addition, subtraction or the functions of basic arithmetic,
we do not need any empirical experience to know that 100 + 100 = 200, and in this way it
would appear that arithmetic is in fact analytic. However, that it is analytic can be disproved
thus: if the numbers five and seven in the calculation 5 + 7 = 12 are examined, there is nothing
to be found in them by which the number 12 can be inferred. Such it is that "5 + 7" and "the
cube root of 1,728" or "12" are not analytic because their reference is the same but their sense is
not that the mathematic judgment "5 + 7 = 12" tells us something new about the world. It is
self-evident, and undeniably a priori, but at the same time it is synthetic. And so Kant proves a
proposition can be synthetic and known a priori.
Kant asserts that experience is based both upon the perception of external objects and a priori
knowledge.[43] The external world, he writes, provides those things that we sense. It is our mind,
though, that processes this information about the world and gives it order, allowing us to
comprehend it. Our mind supplies the conditions of space and time to experience objects.
According to the "transcendental unity of apperception", the concepts of the mind
(Understanding) and the perceptions or intuitions that garner information from phenomena
(Sensibility) are synthesized by comprehension. Without the concepts, perceptions are
nondescript; without the perceptions, concepts are meaningless thus the famous statement,
"Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions (perceptions) without concepts are blind."[44]
Kant also makes the claim that an external environment is necessary for the establishment of the
self. Although Kant would want to argue that there is no empirical way of observing the self, we

can see the logical necessity of the self when we observe that we can have different perceptions
of the external environment over time. By uniting all of these general representations into one
global representation, we can see how a transcendental self emerges. "I am therefore conscious
of the identical self in regard to the manifold of the representations that are given to me in an
intuition because I call them all together my representations.

JOHN STUART MILL

Was a British philosopher, political economist and civil servant. He was an influential
contributor to social theory, political theory and political economy. He has been called "the
most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century".[3] Mill's conception of
liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. Mill
expresses his view on freedom by illustrating how an individual's amelioration of personal
quality and self-improvement is the sole source of true freedom. Only when an individual is
able to attain such a beneficial standard of one's self, whilst in the absence of rendering external
onerosity upon others, in their own journey to procure a higher calibre of self-worth, that true
freedom prevails. Mill's attitude toward freedom and individual accomplishment through selfimprovement has inspired many. By establishing an appreciable level of worthiness concerned
with one's ability to fulfill personal standards of notability and merit, Mill was able to provide
many with a principal example of how they should achieve such particular values.
He was a proponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham. He
worked on the theory of the scientific method. Mill was also a Member of Parliament and an
important figure in liberal political philosophy.
John Stuart Mill was born on Rodney Street in the Pentonville area of London, the eldest son of
the Scottish philosopher, historian and economist James Mill, and Harriet Burrow. John Stuart
was educated by his father, with the advice and assistance of Jeremy Bentham and Francis
Place. He was given an extremely rigorous upbringing, and was deliberately shielded from
association with children his own age other than his siblings. His father, a follower of Bentham
and an adherent of associationism, had as his explicit aim to create a genius intellect that would
carry on the cause of utilitarianism and its implementation after he and Bentham had died.
Mill was a notably precocious child. He describes his education in his autobiography. At the age
of three he was taught Greek. By the age of eight, he had read Aesop's Fables, Xenophon's
Anabasis, and the whole of Herodotus, and was acquainted with Lucian, Diogenes Lartius,
Isocrates and six dialogues of Plato. He had also read a great deal of history in English and had
been taught arithmetic, physics and astronomy.
At the age of eight, Mill began studying Latin, the works of Euclid, and algebra, and was
appointed schoolmaster to the younger children of the family. His main reading was still history,
but he went through all the commonly taught Latin and Greek authors and by the age of ten

could read Plato and Demosthenes with ease. His father also thought that it was important for
Mill to study and compose poetry. One of Mill's earliest poetry compositions was a continuation
of the Iliad. In his spare time, he also enjoyed reading about natural sciences and popular
novels, such as Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe.
His father's work, The History of British India was published in 1818; immediately thereafter,
about the age of twelve, Mill began a thorough study of the scholastic logic, at the same time
reading Aristotle's logical treatises in the original language. In the following year he was
introduced to political economy and studied Adam Smith and David Ricardo with his father,
ultimately completing their classical economic view of factors of production. Mill's comptes
rendus of his daily economy lessons helped his father in writing Elements of Political Economy
in 1821, a textbook to promote the ideas of Ricardian economics; however, the book lacked
popular support. Ricardo, who was a close friend of his father, used to invite the young Mill to
his house for a walk in order to talk about political economy.
At the age of fourteen, Mill stayed a year in France with the family of Sir Samuel Bentham,
brother of Jeremy Bentham. The mountain scenery he saw led to a lifelong taste for mountain
landscapes. The lively and friendly way of life of the French also left a deep impression on him.
In Montpellier, he attended the winter courses on chemistry, zoology, logic of the Facult des
Sciences, as well as taking a course of the higher mathematics. While coming and going from
France, he stayed in Paris for a few days in the house of the renowned economist Jean-Baptiste
Say, a friend of Mill's father. There he met many leaders of the Liberal party, as well as other
notable Parisians, including Henri Saint-Simon.
This intensive study however had injurious effects on Mill's mental health, and state of mind. At
the age of twenty[9] he suffered a nervous breakdown. In chapter V of his Autobiography, he
claims that this was caused by the great physical and mental arduousness of his studies which
had suppressed any feelings he might have developed normally in childhood. Nevertheless, this
depression eventually began to dissipate, as he began to find solace in the Mmoires of JeanFranois Marmontel and the poetry of William Wordsworth.
Mill had been engaged in a pen-friendship with Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism and
sociology, since Mill first contacted Comte in November 1841. Comte's sociologie was more an
early philosophy of science than we perhaps know it today, and the positive philosophy aided in
Mill's broad rejection of Benthamism.
As a nonconformist who refused to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of
England, Mill was not eligible to study at the University of Oxford or the University of
Cambridge. Instead he followed his father to work for the East India Company until 1858, and
attended University College, London, to hear the lectures of John Austin, the first Professor of
Jurisprudence. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences in 1856.

In 1851, Mill married Harriet Taylor after 21 years of an intimate friendship. Taylor was
married when they met, and their relationship was close but generally believed to be chaste
during the years before her first husband died. Brilliant in her own right, Taylor was a
significant influence on Mill's work and ideas during both friendship and marriage. His
relationship with Harriet Taylor reinforced Mill's advocacy of women's rights. He cites her
influence in his final revision of On Liberty, which was published shortly after her death. Taylor
died in 1858 after developing severe lung congestion, after only seven years of marriage to
Mill.
Between the years 1865 and 1868 Mill served as Lord Rector of the University of St. Andrews.
During the same period, 186568, he was a Member of Parliament for City and Westminster,
sitting for the Liberal Party. During his time as an MP, Mill advocated easing the burdens on
Ireland. In 1866, Mill became the first person in the history of Parliament to call for women to
be given the right to vote, vigorously defending this position in subsequent debate. Mill became
a strong advocate of such social reforms as labour unions and farm cooperatives. In
Considerations on Representative Government, Mill called for various reforms of Parliament
and voting, especially proportional representation, the Single Transferable Vote, and the
extension of suffrage. He was godfather to the philosopher Bertrand Russell. In his views on
religion, Mill was an atheist. Mill died in 1873 of erysipelas in Avignon, France, where he was
buried alongside his wife.
Works
Mill's On Liberty addresses the nature and limits of the power that can be legitimately exercised
by society over the individual. However Mill is clear that his concern for liberty does not extend
to all individuals and all societies. He states that "Despotism is a legitimate mode of
government in dealing with barbarians".
Mill states that it is acceptable to harm oneself as long the person doing so is not harming
others. He also argues that individuals should be prevented from doing lasting, serious harm to
themselves or their property by the harm principle. Because no one exists in isolation, harm
done to oneself may also harm others, and destroying property deprives the community as well
as oneself. Mill excuses those who are "incapable of self-government" from this principle, such
as young children or those living in "backward states of society".
Though this principle seems clear, there are a number of complications. For example, Mill
explicitly states that "harms" may include acts of omission as well as acts of commission. Thus,
failing to rescue a drowning child counts as a harmful act, as does failing to pay taxes, or failing
to appear as a witness in court. All such harmful omissions may be regulated, according to Mill.
By contrast, it does not count as harming someone if without force or fraud the affected
individual consents to assume the risk: thus one may permissibly offer unsafe employment to
others, provided there is no deception involved. (Mill does, however, recognise one limit to
consent: society should not permit people to sell themselves into slavery). In these and other

cases, it is important to bear in mind that the arguments in On Liberty are grounded on the
principle of Utility, and not on appeals to natural rights.
The question of what counts as a self-regarding action and what actions, whether of omission or
commission, constitute harmful actions subject to regulation, continues to exercise interpreters
of Mill. It is important to emphasise that Mill did not consider giving offence to constitute
"harm"; an action could not be restricted because it violated the conventions or morals of a
given society.
On Liberty involves an impassioned defence of free speech. Mill argues that free discourse is a
necessary condition for intellectual and social progress. We can never be sure, he contends, that
a silenced opinion does not contain some element of the truth. He also argues that allowing
people to air false opinions is productive for two reasons. First, individuals are more likely to
abandon erroneous beliefs if they are engaged in an open exchange of ideas. Second, by forcing
other individuals to re-examine and re-affirm their beliefs in the process of debate, these beliefs
are kept from declining into mere dogma. It is not enough for Mill that one simply has an
unexamined belief that happens to be true; one must understand why the belief in question is the
true one. Along those same lines Mill wrote, "unmeasured vituperation, employed on the side of
prevailing opinion, really does deter people from expressing contrary opinions, and from
listening to those who express them.
Mill believed that "the struggle between Liberty and Authority is the most conspicuous feature
in the portions of history." For him, liberty in antiquity was a "contest... between subjects, or
some classes of subjects, and the government." Mill defined "social liberty" as protection from
"the tyranny of political rulers." He introduced a number of different concepts of the form
tyranny can take, referred to as social tyranny, and tyranny of the majority respectively.
Social liberty for Mill meant putting limits on the ruler's power so that he would not be able to
use his power on his own wishes and make decisions which could harm society; in other words,
people should have the right to have a say in the government's decisions. He said that social
liberty was "the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society
over the individual". It was attempted in two ways: first, by obtaining recognition of certain
immunities, called political liberties or rights; second, by establishment of a system of
"constitutional checks".
However, in Mill's view, limiting the power of government was not enough. He stated, "Society
can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any
mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more
formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such
extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the
details of life, and enslaving the soul itself."

John Stuart Mill's view on liberty, which was influenced by Joseph Priestley and Josiah Warren,
is that the individual ought to be free to do as he wishes unless he harms others. Individuals are
rational enough to make decisions about their well being. Government should interfere when it
is for the protection of society. Mill explained:
The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with
the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which
power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is
to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He
cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so,
because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or
even right...The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that
which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns him, his independence is, of right,
absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
Mill added: "Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians,
provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.
Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when
mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion."
An influential advocate of freedom of speech, Mill objected to censorship. He says:
I choose, by preference the cases which are least favourable to me In which the argument
opposing freedom of opinion, both on truth and that of utility, is considered the strongest. Let
the opinions impugned be the belief of God and in a future state, or any of the commonly
received doctrines of morality... But I must be permitted to observe that it is not the feeling sure
of a doctrine (be it what it may) which I call an assumption of infallibility. It is the undertaking
to decide that question for others, without allowing them to hear what can be said on the
contrary side. And I denounce and reprobate this pretension not the less if it is put forth on the
side of my most solemn convictions. However, positive anyone's persuasion may be, not only of
the faculty but of the pernicious consequences, but (to adopt expressions which I altogether
condemn) the immorality and impiety of opinion. yet if, in pursuance of that private
judgement, though backed by the public judgement of his country or contemporaries, he
prevents the opinion from being heard in its defence, he assumes infallibility. And so far from
the assumption being less objectionable or less dangerous because the opinion is called immoral
or impious, this is the case of all others in which it is most fatal.
Mill outlines the benefits of 'searching for and discovering the truth' as a way to further
knowledge. He argued that even if an opinion is false, the truth can be better understood by
refuting the error. And as most opinions are neither completely true nor completely false, he
points out that allowing free expression allows the airing of competing views as a way to
preserve partial truth in various opinions. Worried about minority views being suppressed, Mill
also argued in support of freedom of speech on political grounds, stating that it is a critical

component for a representative government to have in order to empower debate over public
policy. Mill also eloquently argued that freedom of expression allows for personal growth and
self-realization. He said that freedom of speech was a vital way to develop talents and realise a
person's potential and creativity. He repeatedly said that eccentricity was preferable to
uniformity and stagnation.
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