PHI304 Blog -- Jacob Robinson

Christian Morality I could certainly see most western law being based around Christian texts, much like how Islamic law shaped the Middle East and Confucianist principles shaped Asia. And since, from a relativist perspective, law shapes the culture’s morality (and vice versa), it makes sense for me to believe that there is an inherently Christian morality that has existed within western states (though perhaps over time has gotten to become more secular). The Greater Being I don’t think that we could understand how the consciousness of a Greater Being. It seems as though our consciousness is the purest distilling of our own nature. The imagery of something beyond consciousness is very foggy, at the least. Acting according to consciousness I believe that we wish to act according to our consciousness, but often fail to. This failure is due to a mix of instinct, anxiety, and other outside factors that cause us to not quite want to act up to our conscious. At the same ti...

Truth is Faith In a sense I can agree that a belief in truth ties directly into faith; not religious faith, but rather the faith that what you believe is true is actually true. We cannot certify that anything is 100% certain, we can only increase the probability of it being certain by lowering the amount of assumptions we make about it. The remaining piece of this, however, has to be ascertained with the faith of believing that, based on probability (or perhaps something else, depending on the person), it is in fact certain. How much does being right matter? It depends, both on what you’re being right about as well as what actually matters. Since my background is in Finance, I’ll give a related example: say you’re buying a big bet on a stock going up. You’d want to be right on this simply based on the fact that, if you are right, you make a ton of money, and if you are wrong, you lose a ton of money. However, money and trading isn’t everything to everyone, and in this cas...

[Just realized I've been erroneously refering to these posts as days instead of weeks. Whoops.] Existential Slavery I feel personally as though this falls into the idea of determinism, or at least determinism in the sense in which I define it. Some background: I believe free will vs fate is more of a battle between what you can do versus what society and nature deem you ought to do. In some cases it makes more sense to follow in line with how things should be, and other times it is best to break out and go a new path. Existential Slavery I believe is defined as the chains in which society and your own mindset hold you to, and so I believe this is an apt comparison. Degrees of Slavery ·         Physical Slavery – actually shackled and forced to do physical work o    Examples: Transatlantic Slave Trade, USSR Gulag Laborers ·         Mental Slavery – trapped into a situation via various psy...