Love

 What is love? Apply principles from the care/love unit (as well as others if you choose) to address this question and the role love plays in societies.

I think that love is having compassion for a person that you dont have for anyone else in the same way. Every person you love, you love differently. You want them to succeed and do well in their life, and you feel for them if they do not. When you love someone, you are kind to them, and you are selfless when you are with them or even just in thinking about them. You treat them the same or better than how you would want to be treated by another person who you hope feels love for you. 

Mo Tzu mentions that if you treat someone like you love them, even if you dont, you can eventually gain a love for them. Which i completely agree with. I dont know my dad's girl friends kids very well, so i wouldnt say that I love them at this point. But because it is possible that they will be family one day, I treat them as if I love them, I care about them, I am nice to them, I try to treat them as good as I possibley can, and I already can tell that I am gaining a sort of love for them. It is different than the love I have for my siblings or my dad, but it is a type of love. 

In another example, I love my best friend. Again, different than the love I have for my brothers and parents, but I have a love for her. Where I want what is best for her and I am always kind to her, or a least try to be 

There are people in my life that I would say I do not love. Not even a little. I would describe it moe as a serious hate. But, if I were to decide to treat them like I loved them rather than hating them I may eventually be able to feel differently about them. 

it is not possible for us to love everyone. People are all different and we can not all be the same and think that others want the same things as us. Because that is not true. 

On that note though, you dont necessarily have to LOVE someone to be nice to them, have some sort of care for them, or be self less towards them. So even though those are all qualities of love, they could also be qualities of toleration too. But that could be a whole other debate.  

Blog 3 Flourishing

In my own life, I think that to flourish you do need to be making good and moral decisions. It is important for any person, religious or not, to have some sort of rules for themselves. Whether they are spoken rules or unspoken rules. I also believe that every does have these to some extent whether they really realize it or not. Would you help a lost little kid find their parents? Would you call the cops if you saw someone getting really hurt by another person (or other things)? So, not necessarily things that you would automatically go, oh yeah that is my moral choice and good descison. Thinking about it, I feel like (back to the last unit) that follows Kants theory a little bit. You just do it because it is right, you dont have a question about it.

Now Ive got myself really thinking differently than I originally was when I started writing this post. I feel like in my life, how I would judge if I were flourishing would be if I was doing things that were good and right, and cause as much happiness as possible for the most people. But not only doing things because they would do that. But at least trying to do it. I like how Kupperman talked about having character and that to have character is to make good decisions and to make a habit out of making those decisions. That is exactly the way I want to live my life, in a habit of good decisions. 

I think the virtue theory fits into this by when you are trying to make a good decision, because you want the most people to be happy, you have to find a median between the two extremes of what you could do sometimes in order to have the "right" decision and the "greatest amount of happiness" all at the same time. 

Reasoning

All of theses texts talk about how your reasoning should be what creates happiness. The difference between how they say this is that Kant says that truth is always what will make people the happiest in the long run, Mill says that when you are reasoning between truth and a lie, go with the one that will bring the greatest happiness in the moment. Nietzsche says that we cant really even come to know truth, you just do what makes you happiest, and it may or may not be true, but you wont ever actually know, because life is so absurd that we will never actually come to know truth. Because of the way of his thinking, he puts Kant and Mill into the same category of believing that there even is a truth. 

Both consequentialism and deontology are about what a person chooses to do. Whether they choose to do it because it is their duty, they feel the need to do it. Or they do it because of the consequences of doing or not doing something. I think that a lot of people mostly follow consequentialism, while at the same time, thinking they are following deontology. They feel it their duty to do something or to not do it, and let some one else take the duty of doing it, but at the same time they wont want to do something without a reward (consequence), so they will find excuses within themselves to make them believe that something really isn't their duty, if there isn't a good reward for them at the end, then they will not want to believe it is their duty. (Hopefully that makes at least half as much sense as it does in my own head...)

Like I previously mentioned above, Nietzche argues- a great example of anti theory- against Kant and Mill, that there is no truth, so there should be no reason to argue against or for it. The world is way too absurd for a person to ever be able to find out a real truth. What one person believes to be true may not be what another person believes to be true, so  how could either of those actually be true.

I have had many instences in my life where reasoning has impacted me. I think one of the biggest examples though is this: 
I have scoliosis and a majority of doctors say, oh we will brace it for as long as possible to maybe help it stop getting worse, and then when that doesnt work, because it usually doesnt, we will do surgery and put big metal rods all the way up and down both sides of your spine. 'Truthfully' this is the only option that you have.  Then, I go to another doctor who does not believe in bracing or surgery, the consequences of that are not right (bracing doesnt work, surgery puts you on disabilty the rest of your life and may not work either). He believes that the right thing to do is alternative chiropractic treatments. After research of the consequences of both of these doctors 'truths' I come to believe that the chiropractic truth is truth for me. As I visit other doctors who hear about my treatment decisions, they reason that there is no way this could work, you cant reverse scoliosis, blah blah blah... (at least thats what i hear). But for them, the consequence of me going to a chiropractor rather than letting them do surgery or make me a brace is that they dont get the money, so how could that be the right truth, if someone else is 'winning' that isnt them. So in this example, it is along the lines of Mills theory of reasoning and truth.