Hinanay, Grace Anne Nicole R.

PHILOPE final exam

1. Radical evil, and virtue, happiness and immortality in Kants

philosophy.

Kant is the deepest philosopher of enlightenment. Kant stands on

the belief that the existence of God, the freedom of the will, the
immortality of the soul, the ultimate triumph of good over evil and
other beliefs that we can and should accept on the basis of a rational
faith. We cannot demonstrate if these beliefs are correct, such
transcendent truths by their very nature go beyond the limits of our
understanding so therefore, they are not known by theoretical reason
but only justified for moral purposes via practical reason. Kant advises
to live as if they were true because of its importance to our practical
and ethical lives. For radical evil, Kants position is not that radical evil
must attach to every rational but finite creature of needs. Our needs
as finite beings involve our human nature, which is innocent. Kant
believes that radical evil attached itself to our predisposition to
humanity (rational self-love). In terms of virtue, Kant points out that
we, as rational human beings are not just bundles of innately given or
socially trained inclinations, we have reasons for our actions and those
reasons are always implicitly general. Distinctively, human virtue
involves having morally good reasons and intentions. The relation
between virtue and happiness as he argues, there is more to morality
than the performance of right actions: he also puts forward the idea
that there must be a final end to moral striving (the highest good)
which is a combination of virtue and happiness for all rational beings.
In relation, it is fundamental that our motive for doing our duty should
not be to reap benefit. We need to have ground to hope that virtue will
eventually be rewarded. Our very motivation for moral action will be
undermined unless we believe that the highest good, the ultimate
combination of virtue and happiness is possible.

A philosophical problem in Kants claims is how people can be

motivated to do their duty, to fulfill a moral obligation when it goes
against their own self-interested desires. Why be moral? is a
question that a skeptic might ask. An important doctrine of Kant is it
does not look on moral praise and blame as just more external
incentives for people to comply with ethical duties. They are instead,
ways of sharing in the reason of one another. All external rewards
and punishments for Kant concern only the realm of law not the
realm of ethics. No ethical duties can be enforced through rewards and
punishments without violating the rights of free beings. Kant presents
his view on a morally severe guise, which suggests that the only
motivation that he approves on is the determination to do ones duty
irrespective of ones own inclinations. As rational beings, we are not
just bundles of innately given or socially trained inclinations; we have
reasons for our actions and these reasons are always implicitly general
so they can be made explicitly as maxims and rationally and morally
assessed. Distinctively human virtue involves having morally good
reasons and intentions. One complication in Kants works is the
concept of evil. He is pulled into two directions. One, he insists very
strongly that the evil in us is a result of our own choice or wrong use
of freedom but on the other hand, in his doctrine of original sin, he
wants to say that evil is radical or innate, a universal and unavoidable
feature of our condition as needy but rational human beings. Kant
stands with the belief that radical evil must attach to every rational but
finite creature of needs. He thinks that it attaches to our predisposition
to humanity not as an inevitable consequence of this predisposition
but as result of its development under social conditions. This is the
Rousseauian aspect of Kants doctrine: the unsocial sociability of
human beings, our need for inclination to be members of society and a
tendency to be selfish and competitive. Paradoxically, Kant's thesis
that we are by nature evil amounts to much the same thing as
Rousseau's famous assertion that we are by nature good the phrase
"by nature" is used by the two philosophers in opposed ways.
Rousseau means by it "prior to the social condition," and he argues
that social development has corrupted original human nature. Kant, in
contrast, thinks that our nature develops properly only in society, but
he doesn't believe there is such a thing as a pre-social human
condition. Kant envisioned the possibility of progress in human history,
worldly hopes, the betterment of the world. In fact, he was a
supporter of the French revolution. In one of his works, he envisions a
world order of peaceful cooperation between nations with democratic
constitutions. Despite for his propensities on evil, Kant was an
enlightenment thinker. Unlike others, he had a vivid and realistic sense
of the dark side of human nature.

2. Economic conditioning and alienation in Marxs philosophy

Karl Marx is known as the greatest theorist of the industrial
revolution, the development of the contemporary capitalist economic
system. Marx is a philosopher who denied the existence of God and
believed that every person is a product of the particular economic
state of human society in which he or she lives. Despite being hostile
to religion, Marx inherited an ideal of human equality from Christianity
and he believes that the Enlightenment hope that scientific method
could help diagnose and solve the problems of human society. Marx
strongly condemns religion and even called it as the opium of the
people which distracts men from their real social problems. He believes
that the universe exists without anybody behind or beyond it. Marx
replaces the notion of sin (in the context of Christianity) by the
concept of alienation, which says that some ideal standard that actual
human life does not meet. Marxs idea of alienation is from ones own
self, from ones own true nature. He claims that human beings have
potential and that the socioeconomic conditions of capitalism do not
allow them to develop. For Marx, the socioeconomic system of
capitalism must be replaced by communism. It is an inevitable change
because of laws of historical development. Marx envisions a society
where in people can become their real selves, no longer alienated by
economic conditions but freely active in cooperation with one another.
According to him, alienation is rooted in the social and economic
context. Under the capitalist system, labor is something alien to the
laborer; he works not for himself but for someone else who directs the
process and owns the product as private property.

Marxs definition of alienation compromises a description of certain

features of capitalist society and a value judgment that they are
fundamentally wrong. The notion is vague which makes it difficult to
point out exactly which features of capitalism Marx is criticizing. Marx
did not totally condemned capitalism: he acknowledged that it
generates economic productivity and he believes that capitalism is a
necessary stage for economic and social development, but he thought
that it would be and should be surpassed. Marx says that alienation is
from man himself and from nature but it is not clear how one can be
alienated from oneself. Nature seems to mean the humanly made
world so we can take it as him saying that people are not what they
should be because they are alienated from the objects and social
relations that they create. People without capital have to sell their
labor in order to survive and are therefore dominated in their working
lives by the interests of the owners of capital. And the competitiveness
of life under capitalism conflicts with the ideal of solidarity with other
human beings as emphasized by Feuerbach. The general idea that
emerges from this is that capitalist society is not in accordance with
basic human nature. Another vague concept by Marx is how the
abolition of private property is supposed to ensure the disappearance
of alienation and the coming of a genuinely classless society and how
it will be achieved. But he was realistic when he said that there would
be an intermediate period before the transition can take place and that
will require the dictatorship of the proletariat. Yet, there were strong
elements in Marxs vision that is agreeable. The application of science
and technology, the shortening of the working day, the provision of
universal education, the vision of a decentralized society in which
cooperation is possible for the common good and a society balanced
with nature- these are all ideals that almost everyone agrees on.

3. Determinism and well-being/mental health in Freudian theory

The Freudian theory by Sigmund Freud offers distinctive ways of
explaining human actions and attitudes. One of the Freudian theorys
assumptions is materialism. Freud distinguishes mental states and
psychological states of the nervous system, which is a different
language for him, not a dualism of two substances (mind and body).
Another assumption is determinism, which is the principle that every
event has preceding causes-to the realm of the mental. Thoughts and
behavior that had formally been assumed to be of no significance for
understanding a person-such as slips of the tongue, faulty actions,
dreams and neurotic symptoms. Freud assumed that it must be
determined by hidden causes in a persons mind. He thought these
could be highly significant, revealing in disguised form what would
otherwise remain unknown. He claims that nothing that a person
thinks or says is really accidental; everything can be explained by
something in the persons mind. This could imply a denial of free will
for even when we think we are choosing perfectly freely, Freud would
claim that there are unknown causes that determine our choice. The
third and most distinctive feature of his theory is the postulation of
unconscious mental states. Freud called this preconscious (meaning
that they can readily become conscious) he reserves the term
unconscious for states that cannot become conscious under normal
circumstances. He asserts that our minds are not co-extensive with
what is available to conscious attention but include items of which we
can have no ordinary knowledge. For him, the mind is like an iceberg
with only a small proportion of it visible above the surface but with a
vast hidden bulk below. We are often unaware of the processes in our
minds. Freud says that individual well being or mental health depends
on harmonious relationship among various parts of the mind and
between the person and the external social world in which he or she
has to live. The ego has to reconcile id, superego and external world,
choosing opportunities for satisfying the instinctual demands without
transgressing the moral standards required by the superego, the
internal representative of society. If the world does not supply enough
opportunities for fulfillment, suffering will result, but even when the
environment is reasonably favorable, there will be mental disturbance
if there is too much inner conflict among the parts of the mind.
Neurotic illnesses result from the frustration of the sexual instinct,
either because of external obstacles or because of internal mental
imbalance.

The strength of Freuds theory is that he hopes to restore

harmonious balance between the parts of the mind and to suggest
ways to improve individual adjustment to the world. The latter might
involve programs of social reforms, but Freud never specified it in
detail. He was realistic about the limits of therapeutic influence- he
famously described the aim of psychoanalysis as only to replace
neurotic unhappiness by ordinary unhappiness. Freud never thought
that psychoanalysis is the answer to every human problem. He was
realistic enough to realize their extreme complexity and to abstain
from offering any general social program but he did suggest that
psychoanalysis had much wider application than just the treatment of
neurotics. Freud arrives at very specific claims; such as that all our
dreams are wish fulfillments, often in disguised form. But even if we
accept that every dream must have a cause of some sort, it does not
follow what that the cause must be mental rather than physical. Even
if the cause s mental, it does not follow that it is unconscious, or
deeply significant. What if no interpretation is found? A Freudian
individual will assert that it must be wish fulfillment whose disguise
has not yet been seen through but this would make it impossible to
show that a dream is not a disguised wish fulfillment and would
threaten to evacuate the claim of any genuine empirical content,
leaving only the suggestion that we should always look for a relevant
wish. Freuds claim can only supported if it has independent evidence
for the existence of the wish and the correct interpretation of its
disguise. For the unconscious mental states, we must ask ourselves if
it offers any good explanation of what we know about human beings.
We should not dismiss them just because they are unobservable. Or
scientific theory often postulates entities that are not perceptible by
the senses for example, atoms, electrons, magnetic fields, and radio
waves. But in these cases there are clear rules connecting the
theoretical entities with observable phenomena; we can, for instance,
infer the presence or absence of a magnetic field from the visible
behavior of a com- pass needle or iron filings. In explaining human
action and behavior in everyday terms, we appeal to beliefs,
perceptions, sensations, desires and intentions and none of these are
literally observable states. Freuds theorizing goes a little way beyond
this everyday and relatively uncontroversial sort of explanation.