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.

1. 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 pre-occupation 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.

2. 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.

3. JEREMY BENTAHMWas 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 19th-century "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 KANTWas 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 (16km) from Knigsberg, he worked between 1750 and 1754 as a "Hauslehrer" (tutor) in Judtschen (now Veselovka, Russia, approx. 20km) and in Gro-Arnsdorf (now near Elblg, Poland, approx. 105km). 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 generalIn 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 self-reflection 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 MILLWas 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 self-improvement 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 Jean-Franois 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.WorksMill'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.References1. ^ "Ethics [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]". Iep.utm.edu. http://www.iep.utm.edu/ethics/. Retrieved 2012-08-15.2. ^ Almond, Brenda (ed. with D Hill),1991 Applied Philosophy: Morals and Metaphysics in Contemporary Debate London: Routledge.3. ^ Appiah, Kwame Anthony. (2008). Experiments in Ethics. Harvard University Press.4. ^ LaFollette, Hugh (2002). Ethics in Practice (2nd Edition). Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 0-631-22834-9.5. ^ Cuneo,Terence, 2007. The Normative Web: An Argument for Moral Realism, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-921883-76. ^ Michael Brady (ed.). 2011 New Waves in Metaethics. Aldershot: Palgrave Macmillan.7. ^ Mackie, J. L. Ethics, Inventing right and wrong. 1977 Penguin8. ^ Brewer, T. (2009). The retrieval of ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.9. ^ Campbell, R. J. (2011). The concept of truth. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.10. ^ Smith, Holly(1991). "Deriving Morality From Rationality". In Peter Vallentyne (ed.), Contractarianism and Rational choice: Essays on David Gauthier's Morals by Agreement. Cambridge University Press.11. ^ Noddings, Nel, Ethics from the Stand Point Of Women, in Deborah L. Rhode, ed., Theoretical Perspectives on Sexual Difference (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990).12. ^ Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes' error: emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: Putnam.13. ^ Edmund L. Gettier 1963. "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" From Analysis 23 ( 1963): 121-123.14. ^ Quine, W.V.O. (1951), "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," The Philosophical Review 60: 20-43. Reprinted in his 1953 From a Logical Point of View. Harvard University Press.15. ^ (Lyotard, Jean Franois, 1979, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge16. ^ Dancy, Stephen 2004 Ethics Without Principles. Oxford: Clarendon Press.17. ^ Smith, Adam (2002) [1759]. Knud Haakonssen. ed. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521598478.18. ^ Stroud, Barry 2011, Engagement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction: Modality and Value, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-976496-9.19. ^ Miller, C. (2009). "The Conditions of Moral Realism." The Journal of Philosophical Research, 34, 123-155.20. ^ FitzPatrick, William J Recent work on ethical realism Analysis.2009; 69: 746-76021. ^ Joyce, Richard and Kirchin, Simon (Eds.) A World without Values: Essays on John Mackie's Moral Error Theory Springer 201022. ^ Moral Relativism Gilbert Harman Princeton University December 17, 2011, unpublished23. ^ Moral Relativism24. ^ Darwall, Stephen et al.1997 Moral Discourse and Practice, Oxford, p 725. Boralevi, Lea Campos (1984). Bentham and the Oppressed. Berlin: De Gruyter. ISBN3-11-009974-8.26. Burns, J. H. (1989). "Bentham and Blackstone: A Lifetime's Dialectic". Utilitas 1: 22. doi:10.1017/S0953820800000042.27. Dinwiddy, John (2004). Bentham: selected writings of John Dinwiddy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ISBN978-0-8047-4520-8.28. Everett, Charles W. (1966). "Jeremy Bentham". London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.29. Gunn, J.A.W. (1989). "Jeremy Bentham and the Public Interest", in J. Lively & A. Reeve (eds.) Modern Political Theory from Hobbes to Marx: Key Debates, London, pp.19921930. Harris, Jonathan (1998). "Bernardino Rivadavia and Benthamite "discipleship"". Latin American Research Review 33: 12949.31. Harrison, Ross (1983). Bentham. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN0-7100-9526-0.32. Kelly, P.J. (1990). Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice: Jeremy Bentham and the Civil Law. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN0-19-825418-0.33. Lucas, Philip; Sheeran, Anne (2006). "Asperger's Syndrome and the Eccentricity and Genius of Jeremy Bentham". Journal of Bentham Studies 8. Available online34. Duncan Bell, "John Stuart Mill on Colonies," Political Theory, Vol. 38 (February 2010), pp. 3464.35. David O. Brink, "Mill's Deliberative Utilitarianism," in Philosophy and Public Affairs 21 (1992), 67103.36. Clifford G. Christians and John C. Merrill (eds.) Ethical Communication: Five Moral Stances in Human Dialogue, Columbia, MO.: University of Missouri Press, 200937. Adam Gopnik, "Right Again, The passions of John Stuart Mill," The New Yorker, 6 October 2008.