Extra Credit: Review of First Week

This is the first philosophy class that I have learned a lot in this one week.  As an engineering student I have always had some resentment about classes like this because of how they do not present science but rather subjective ideas.  I was surprised to see however, how interesting and relevant this course has been to my own life.  Starting with the correlation between philosophy and ethics.  However, I think what has really helped contribute to this learning process has been the philosophizing through the correspondence that we have been required to keep by writing comments.  I think that very rarely do we allow other people to critique our philosophies often because we are afraid of people poking holes in our beliefs.  I found this has already happened to me on several occasions the first after Prompt 1 (1).  I made a comment about eating meat being natural in the world around us.  However, Ethan was able to provide some insight that I had never considered comparing meat consumption of animals which is directly related to survival vs a human eating an animal is a choice because other options exist that can sustain our life.

Another item that we learned about was the idea of the moral continuum.  This segment caused several rather earth shattering revelations about the idea of my ethics and how they were formed.  I believe this is because I possessed the rather egotistical view that the views I had were somehow a universal code.  However, upon learning about extreme realism and relativism I was able to better understand that my my morals have been derived from my surroundings which is an already established Idea known as cultural relativism.  The next lecture presented even more ideas about my perception of the world.  I have realized that for most of my life I have looked at the world solely in terms of humans being the most important species this idea being anthropocentrism.  This served as a very appropriate segue into the discussion of animals rights.  We read two different readings from Singer and Regan.  Both of these ideas presented different ideas about animal liberation but both recognizing that animals have rights.  Singer uses the criteria of whether or not an animal should have equal rights as a human by whether or not a creature can experience suffering because this is the limitation of properties that we can use if we consider the least common denominator among humans and thus some animals are capable of feeling this emotion as well.  Regan uses a more vague term of 'inherent value' as a metric for which animals should have equal rights.  While I have found that my views are still represent speciesism I think that acknowledging other argument is crucial in so that we can help solidify or even establish a view on a subject.  The most important shift I think that I have had during the first week of this course is better understanding my own beliefs (not even just limited to the topics in this course) as well as an acknowledgement that my own beliefs are not right and to keep a more open mind when understanding other peoples arguments.

(1) http://phil149.blogspot.com/2012/01/prompt-01.html#comment-form