Goal 12: PHIL 308, Intro to Ethics
This class introduced a new way of thinking when considering the outcome of everyday events, or even political issues that we see on the news everyday. As we learned about the different argument forms for the actions that people take, this course puts into perspective the alternative actions that could be taken, and the reasoning behind any decision we may make.
While the way we solve problems every day see, pretty straightforward, Dr. Moore took these arguments in fun, and sometimes morbid or unorthodox directions to get us to think. For example, any argument or issues, such as climate change, can be plugged into an argument format that will show the effect of someone deciding to neglect the issues, or to focus on conservative efforts.
Knowing that climate change was an issue that I was passionate about, I chose to write my thesis argument on the “Perfect Storm Argument”. As a part of the class, we learned how to extract the main argument from an authors statement, write it in an argument form, and evaluate whether or not their argument is sound. An example of the argument that I extracted is below.
Perfect Storm Argument
- There are many good reasons as to why people are motivated to ignore climate change.
- Still, if we do ignore climate change, then we will be much worse off
- If there are many good reasons why people are motivated to ignore climate change, and by ignoring climate change we will be much worse off, then it still morally wrong to ignore climate change.
- Therefore, it is morally wrong to ignore climate change.
Overall, this class showed me how I can evaluate things, or look at things from a new perspective. A main take away, is that philosophy often is hard to understand; there are many arguments that can be made, and they are sometimes very drastic or confusing as well. However, this was a very challenging course, although very fun to see the different explanations and understanding as to how the world works, and the things that drive human behavior.