Sample Essay on Ethics
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1. Ethics, as viewed by Aristotle, is an attempt to find out our chief end or highest good: an end which he maintains is really final. Though many ends of life are only means to further ends, our aspirations and desires must have some final object or pursuit. This idea of morality is given by the faculty of moral insight. The truly good person is at the same time a person of perfect insight, and a person of perfect insight is also perfectly good. Our idea of the ultimate end of moral action is developed through habitual experience, and this gradually frames itself out of particular perceptions. It is the job of reason to apprehend and organize these particular perceptions. However, moral action is never the result of a mere act of the understanding, nor is it the result of a simple desire which views objects merely as things which produce pain or pleasure. We start with a rational conception of what is advantageous, but this conception is in itself powerless without the natural impulse which will give it strength. The will or purpose implied by morality is thus either reason stimulated to act by desire, or desire guided and controlled by understanding. These factors then motivate the willful action. Freedom of the will is a factor with both virtuous choices and vicious choices.
Pleasure is not to be identified with Good. Pleasure is found in the consciousness of free spontaneous action. It is an invisible experience, like vision, and is always present when a perfect organ acts upon a perfect object. Our chief end is the perfect development of our true nature; it thus must be particularly found in the realization of our highest faculty, that is, reason. It is this in fact which constitutes our personality, and we would not be pursuing our own life, but the life of some lower being, if we followed any other aim. Self-love accordingly may be said to be the highest law of morals, because while such self-love may be understood as the selfishness which gratifies a person's lower nature, it may also be, and is rightly, the love of that higher and rational nature which constitutes each person's true self. Such a life of thought is further recommended as that which is most pleasant, most self-sufficient, most continuous, and most consonant with our purpose.
2. Human beings are capable of wonder and awe. It serves no evolutionary or biological purpose. It does not conform to reason. There is something that calls to us, seemingly from another realm, subtly whispering there is something and not nothing. That is the primary wonder of life, that there is anything at all.
A long standing question in philosophy has been "why is there something rather than nothing?". While it is suggested that a set of states of non-existence (ie, our universe, or our existence) would appear, relative to one another, to occupy non-zero relative volume, in absolute terms, the universe would still occupy zero volume. It's not anything, and it's not something, yet it isn't the negation of something, either. Traditional logic is no help, since it merely regards all negation as derivative from something positive.
Carefully contemplating nothing in itself, we begin to notice the importance and vitality of our own moods. Above all else, Nothing is what produces in us a feeling of dread. This deep feeling of dread, is the most fundamental human clue to the nature and reality of nothing
Something exists rather than nothing; the world IS. Before any concept, theory, experience, knowledge or science, there IS. Before the clouds, before the wind, before the ice, before the sun that waited to rise, there IS. There IS. And to that realization there is no other question, and no answer is needed; there is only wonder. There IS and that is an amazing thing.
In many ways, though, this seems an empty statement. So what, the world exists, this seems rather self-evident. In truth, though, this starting point is very different from how we usually imagine it. We normally are preoccupied with things of the world. The fundamental fact, the world exists, is ignored. But the fact of Being is the fundamental mystery without which every other question about the world would vanish. The fact that there IS is really pretty amazing if you think about it.
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