One of the questions that I personally found very interesting in philosophy was how people would come to be the people they are today. I’d often wonder if it were a situation where people are generally blank slates who develop thanks to their experiences or if they had an essential being that wasn’t subject to the whims of a world that they can not control. And personally I always gravitated towards the former option and over time I began to more firmly believe that this idea of humans having an essential nature to be generally more true than nurture, but I also see it s more comforting and beautiful in a sense. Now of course scientifically we know that humans are a split between nature, but the full extent is yet unknown. What is known however is that someone’s genetics largely informs the full potential of someone in life and that it takes a proper nurturing environment to realize and that personality is largely dependent on ones genes through twin studies (experiments where scientists observe the development of identical twins in two different environments). I believe that these scientific findings are to be heartening because it shows that we have inherent personalities making us unique than anyone else and any other person placed in the same situation as you would end up being in entirely different circumstances as you. Some might find the idea that personality and maximum capabilities are described before your birth and say that it is a form of destiny where one cannot choose to be who they are, but I’d have to humbly disagree. I believe that those factors that define everyone before birth is what makes everyone special and unique and if it were instead decided by the environment that would make humans in general less unique because you could effectively recreate a person by simulating their lifestyle. Both nature and nurture people aren’t in control of who they are really because they can’t choose how they’re born and they can’t choose their environments during their developmental years and because of this some tend to argue that free will is an illusion and that we almost have programed responses to stimuli depending on either our nature or our upbringing but generally it’s seen as irrelevant because in the end you can not control either. But I’m not as disheartened at the prospect of being unable to choose one’s being because that randomness creates a certain dynamic universe of unique people and people can make decisions that sometimes go against what their nature or nurture naturally informs because of their self consciousness and can choose to choose to embrace or reject both their nature and nurture. In my view free will does exist but any reader can feel free to disagree and all of these complexities of life is one of many aspects that make it a magnificent thing worth living.

Within the history of the catholic church, Judaism and daoism there has been a substantial amount of philosophical musings attempting to explain God in an amicable manner. Likewise there have been detractors of religion who have also used philosophy and reason to disprove the presence of a greater power. I will start by analyzing the catholic church and its philosophies particularly through St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas

Morality is a cornerstone of human development and civilization has a wealth of philosophical content to explore, so much that it can’t be fully realized within just this one blog post. However, I’d like to introduce the general philosophies one can have on what morality is and then explore an interesting specificity within moral thought.

There are three primary understandings of where ultimate moral authority comes from one being the most obvious and that being from a or many higher powers, the second being from some greater universal good that is supported by rationality and the final view being that there is no true moral authority and that everything moral is relative. Morality established from a higher power is the most classic interpretation because it provides the most direct answer to what is truly right. If there is an all knowing and all powerful being that created everything then surely they can say how things ought to be. The second being moral absolutism established by the thinker Emmanuel Kant, believing that all humans can come to a consensus on what is morally good. Kant’s view has no room for moral grey areas and the end never justifies the means, if a parent steal food for their starving children then they are immoral for having stolen. The third view on morality is the most malleable and has certainly come about as a result of the increased exposure to other global cultures who maintain different values then us. To say that any another culture’s practices are immoral is judgmental because our societal morality and ethics could be just as arbitrary as theirs.

Within these 3 frameworks are greater moral questions such as whether an immoral act in the present that creates a greater future is justified, or to put it simply does the end justify the means? Niccolo Machiavelli asserted the idea that for any state to succeed that they must maintain the idea that the end justifies the means. The Catholic Church maintains the idea that the ends never justify the means, however, a slight contradiction can be found within the church’s just war theory because, to paraphrase it, a country is allowed to initiate war against another and must defeat them to ultimately create more good within the Earth.

Now I believe in a morality established through God because of my belief in Catholicism, but if I did not believe in any sort of higher power then I would reach a sort of medium between moral relativism and moral absolutism where I believe that every civilization will not have the same propensity for some ultimate morality, but some will function and provide better lifestyles than others proving them to be better moral codes to follow. Ultimately when it comes to living life I live in accordance with what I understand to be good as described by Marcus Aurelius in his indelible advice to “Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.”

• Within eastern philosophy there is a dichotomy between accepting the natural ways of the world and rejecting it. The ancient religion of daoism was deeply connected with accepting the natural world, while its rival religion confucianism was about trying to be the most disciplined and organized person that you can be. Ultimately confucianists struggled against nature to succeed in life and fully embraced complex society while daoism would discourage such things. Daoism’s stress in letting nature take its course can be seen through the idea of legitimate action through inaction because oftentimes doing nothing is the way to allow the natural world to work. The idea of simply doing nothing was seen as lazy and weak willed in confucianism however because confucianism stressed the necessity of being a hard-working member of society. The same general concept can also be found within western philosophical tradition with ideas in favor of the natural way like social darwinism and ideas that ultimately rejected it like equality of outcome. Social darwinism shows a certain relinquishment of social improvement or change to nature because it encourages the government allowing people to succeed and fail in society based on their own merits. There is the flaw within social darwinism that doesn’t acknowledge that this system can create inequality of opportunity, but the philosophy is still focusing on laying what’s naturally meant to happen happen through social inaction. Equality of outcome is quite different however in that it rejects natural hierarchies in nature that arise due to natural talents or attributes that one would have or the continuance of familial wealth through inheritance. Equality of outcome ultimately wishes to create fairness throughout all of society by trying to limit the rewards that people reap from those talents and birthrights because they didn’t personally earn them. Finally the idea of the natural world and a human constructed one rejecting it can also be found within legal philosophy. Thomas Hobbes and John Locke focused on their works on the state of the world before governments and human organization. Locke believed that before government people were working in their own self-interest but they also had natural rights to life, liberty and property. Hobbes believed that the world was a wicked and oppressive place until government because humans are inherently cowardly and weak, leading him to support controlling monarchical governance to keep the people in line. Both philosophical views were based on whether the ways of the natural world and humans within nature were legitimate. I personally agree with the natural world having more value in most situations when it comes to philosophy, but both positions are entirely valid, even at the heights that human civilization has reached now we can still find wisdom from the natural world or can leave it in the past.