Critical thinking Essay Example for Free

Critical thinking Essay Utilitarianists are often persecuted for holding a morality in which the end always justifies the means, no matter how repulsive it may be to intuitional moral standards. Hare attempts to quiet controversy by combining act and rule utilitarianism in daily life in such a way that internal moral standards are satisfied and overall good is promoted. Kymlicka stays firm in his opposition to Hare’s theories and shuns the idea of consequentialism having intrinsic value greater than that of intuitive moral standards. Hare’s process of critical thinking combined with intuitionism leads to a flawless conclusion based on systematic procedure that will benefit the most people in the long term even against Kymlicka’s well thought out arguments. Kymlicka thinks that utilitarianism bypasses immediate obligations that should be fulfilled. He believes that utilitarianists’ foresight actually hinders their ability to do what is â€Å"right† or â€Å"just† in the present. He also believes that utilitarianism gives too much weight to illegitimate preferences, meaning that utilitarianists can often choose to do the worse option in consideration in order to satiate a desire for immoral happiness. In the specific case that he puts forward, Kymlicka uses the simple example of an everyday action in which a loan is given to him and he faces the moral dilemma of whether or not he should repay it. He believes that the utilitarianist might keep the money or give it away rather than repaying it if he thought that it would produce the most good in the end to himself or some other party. One may argue that by loaning out money it is consensual and therefore cannot be categorized as theft when the amount is not repaid. However, the loan was made with the qualification and equal understanding that the money would be repaid. Since Kymlicka uses the term â€Å"loan,† he is very much aware that he has the obligation to pay the money back. This may be called breaking a promise as well as theft, so it is doubly breaking a moral standard. Herein lays Kymlicka’s problem with utilitarianism and its criteria of morality. Phil 434 First Writing Assignment 1. Due Mon. Sep 13 Hare believes that there are two levels to moral thinking – critical and intuitive. Critical thinking is systematic and calculated while intuitive thinking is vaguer and based on feelings rather than a systematic procedure. It is said that each person starts at the intuitive level and then progresses to the critical level with age and maturity in understanding. He uses the example of two beings from opposite ends of the spectrum to show what one must be to think purely critically or intuitively – an archangel and a prole. The archangel has no human flaws thus can think critically all the time, and a prole has human flaws to an extreme degree thus must rely on intuitive thinking all the time. Consequentialism is the major theme of critical thinking, which aims to promote the most good to the most people in the end. He postulates, however, that since the human condition is flawed and cannot predict with certainty and without bias what is best in the long run, intuition must be used. Where intuition comes from is a controversial subject – but most believe that upbringing and environment have a strong effect on it and therefore may be tampered with. Since both levels have the possibility to be flawed, they must be used in conjunction. Vacillating between the two is the only way to make good moral decisions throughout one’s entire life. It can be argued that the two levels agree many times in normal day-to-day cases since there is a commonality to moral thinking, such as the law of non-maleficence. Both place in high respect accomplishing what is â€Å"good,† but both have different criteria as to what qualifies – namely what promotes the most good versus what you intuitively know to be the right thing to do. According to the utilitarianist, in a perfect world, critical thinking would be used all the time. Since humans have limits, however, Hare allows and even encourages intuitionism to be used and used often even though he views critical thinking to be superior. One cannot expect to sever himself of all emotion and possess the capability to see the exact outcomes of all possible Phil 434 First Writing Assignment 2.

L.a. confidential :: essays research papers

Commonly, when we make value judgements about people we speak as if there were a single norm towards which everyone ought to be growing. They're supposed to succeed in becoming perfect specimens. You can tell whether they do by seeing how well they perform according to a checklist of desired features. We also speak as if people have an outside and an inside, and that on the inside, they're really either good or bad. It's hard to analyze Ellroy's characters in these terms. For Bud White we'd have to say that he was warped by his early trauma. What his father did to him made him a brute, yet he still has enough inner decency to try to prevent women from being abused. Or—Wait a minute!—is it the opposite? Maybe, he's a brute by nature and it's only thanks to the terrible thing that happened to his mother that he has some morality. Neither of these explanations seems to satisfy, because the framework on which they are constructed is inadequate. Bud doesn't seem to fit into a dichotomy of outside versus inside. Also, the things that make him bad seem more or less identical to the things that make him good: his hatred of violence towards women, his blind persistence. Bud White doesn't seem to have had any chance at perfection. So, what can he do then, assuming he wants to make a decent adult out of himself? Maybe Bud has to start out from where he is and we have to interpret his current actions against that background instead of comparing them to an abstract, one-size-fits-all standard. L.A. Confidential is about three men and a woman who find themselves in medias res. They don't get any single chance to decide forever what they'll be. They're already on the wrong side. They don't seem to be able to separate out their imperfections from their perfections, so their job seems to be to take all of what they've got, including their neuroses and the ghosts from their past, and to use it as raw material to continuously reconstruct themselves. They can't make themselves perfect: the moving finger has already written and moved on. The things that they go through, terrible as they are, do give them a chance to make themselves better.

Review of Kelly and Kulman’s Article Kid Power

The article chosen for review is â€Å"Kid Power† by Katy Kelly and Linda Kulman, U. S. News ; World Report. It was posted on September 5, 2004. The article discusses the psychology and marketing that is accomplished by major companies. Advertising companies spend over $15 billion a year telling kids what is hot and what they need to buy. Kids are surrounded with carefully researched messages and marketing telling them what to do.The parenting style has become more flexible and less authoritarian in the last 25 years. All this tiny consumers in United States will recognize logos at the age of 18 months and by 2 children will ask products by brand name. It should be noted that a child will watch 40,000 commercials every year and some parents reported that the baby’s first words was not â€Å"mama† or â€Å"dada† but â€Å"Coke†. United States with only 4. 5 percent of the population buys 45 percent of the global toy production.American kids will get an average of 70 new toys a year. Kids will influence the family decision buying power of parent by 670 billion worth of purchases, small items such as which snacks to buy and large items as a SUV for the family trips with the kids. If we compare the military budget in United States is 418 billion, much smaller than the kids buying power. There is a strong opposition to this barrage of advertising by many fronts.That is why marketers count on kids to nag parents to the point of purchase. The American Psychological Association added its voice to that of the American Academy of Pediatrics is reporting that advertising is directed toward children and is deceptive and exploits children under age 8. Also, the APA says that before the age of 4 or 5, kids can not distinguish between a show and a commercial. In the future most likely we will see legislation to curve the limit on advertising to children.

Credability of Eyewitness Testimony Essay - 852 Words

Credability of Eyewitness Testimony Is Eyewitness testimony reliable and accurate? Include case studies to back this up. EWT refers to evidence supplied by people who witness a specific event or crime, relying on their own memory. Statements often include descriptions given in a criminal trial and subsequent identification by individuals who were present at the crime scene. EWT is likely to dependent on reconstructive memory(Bartlett,1932) which describes how memory is more than a passive recall. It is the active process of building up memory using fragments to fill gaps of an event in memory plus the expectations and assumptions (schema) of that event. This form of EWT is not 100%†¦show more content†¦Emotion can also affect the accuracy of memory. It can enhance recall or suppress it. Loftus (1979) was called as an expert witness on the psychology of memory initial of a shop assistant, Melville, had identified a robber Jose Garcia. One of the points she made into memory was research, was about the effects of emotion. Melville was in a state of extreme distress after seeing a colleague was shot, and psychologists have found that arousal of stress have a negative on memory recall- especially the STM. Although the EWT is useful, Bartlett and Loftus has been very useful in highlighting the potential biases in EWT and these insights have been applied to the cognitive interview. Loftus research on EWT has had a positive impact on police and court procedures, as it highlighted that leading questions should be avoided, and so the answer must not be implied in the question; and it identified the distorting effect of post-event information and so information should not be given away to the witness inadvertently (or not) in questioning. For example, the