Exam 7: Plato Why Should We Be Good

Nietzsche says, "To be sure, an ominous new superstition, a peculiar narrowness of interpretation, attained supremacy precisely thereby: the origin of an action was interpreted in the most definite sense possible; people were agreed in the belief that the value of an action lay in the value of its ..."

According to Huxley, "Whatever differences of opinion may exist among experts there is a general consensus that the ape and tiger methods of the struggle for existence are not reconcilable with metaphysics."

According to Nietzsche, "Supposing that nothing else is 'given' as real but our world of desires and passions, that we cannot sink or rise to any other 'spirit' but just that of our impulses; for thinking is only a relation of these impulses to one another."

Explain what Nietzsche means when he says, "Supposing that nothing else is 'given' as real but our world of desires and passions, that we cannot sink or rise to any other 'reality' but just that of our impulses; for thinking is only a relation of these impulses to one another."

According to the received nature, or common view of justice (not Socrates's view), people who practice justice do so against their will and out of necessity.

According to Thomson, "The emendation which may be made at this point is this: the right to life consists not in the right not to be killed, but rather in the right not to be ..."

Explain what Hursthouse means when she says, "Claims about what constitutes flourishing for human beings no more float free of scientific facts about what human beings are like than ethological claims about what constitutes flourishing for elephants. In both cases, the truth of the claims depends in part on what kind of animal they are and what capacities, desires and interests the humans or elephants have."

According to Aristotle, moral virtue is a product of what?

Explain what Mill means when he says, "It is by associating the doing right with pleasure, or the doing wrong with pain, or by eliciting and impressing and bringing home to the person's experience the pleasure naturally involved in the one or the pain in the other, that it is possible to call forth that will to be virtuous, which, when confirmed, acts without any thought of either pleasure or pain."

Thomson asks us to consider the following thought experiment: "You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious _________. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help."

Hume says, "Reason being cool and disengaged, is no motive to action, and directs only the impulse received from appetite or inclination, by showing us the means of attaining happiness or avoiding misery."

According to Hanley, "Clones are no more likely to be turned into brainwashed armies than we non-clones are (sadly, they will be no less likely to, either). Clones are no more or less likely to lack autonomy."

According to Hursthouse, "To possess a virtue is to be a certain sort of person with a certain complex ________. (Hence the extreme recklessness of attributing a virtue on the basis of a single action.)"

According to Mill, "Next to _____________, the principal cause which makes life unsatisfactory, is want of mental cultivation."

According to Huxley, "Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain, but of those who are ethically the best."

According to Hanley, a very common intuition concerning the putative wrongness of human cloning is "the description of cloning as 'replication' rather than 'reproduction,' with the implication that cloning is a threat to humanity."

According to Singer, "it should be clear that we would have to give away enough to ensure that the ________________, dependent as it is on people spending on trivia rather than giving to famine relief, would slow down and perhaps disappear entirely."

According to Nietzsche, "A new order of philosophers is appearing; I shall venture to baptize them by a name not without danger. As far as I understand them, as far as they allow themselves to be understood-for it is their nature to wish to remain something of a puzzle-these philosophers of the future might rightly, perhaps also wrongly, claim to be designated as satisfiers."

Explain what Nietzsche means when he says, "we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one fundamental form of will-namely, the Will to Power."

According to Kant, "ethics may also be defined as the system of the ends of spiritual aspect of mind."