To finish off my passion blog I think I should come full circle and assert my own personal philosophies, combining all of my previous blog posts to allow myself, as well as my readers, to reflect on all the philosophical ideas covered in this blog. I would almost like this blog post to serve as a time capsule for my ideas because it is inevitable that as time passes my views will change and it will be interesting to look back on mine today. An example of my philosophical growth was that in high school I was very interested in enlightenment ideas and was entirely focused on individualism while writing off collectivism as a sort of evil. However, my views shifted in recent years to almost find a happy medium between the two because I now understand that communities, a form of collectivism, are integral to the identity and success of an individual in life; individual rights are still paramount to maintain however and I believe that the ideal society would strike a harmonious balance between the two that would provide the foundational strength of collectivism and the freedom of individualism. On the essentialism vs relativism issue I am generally very biased in favor of essentialism although I do acknowledge human constructs. I believe that beyond flawed human constructs is an essential nature to things however, for example, even though the taxonomy of animals is flawed at present I still think that animals do truly belong to certain groupings, we just haven’t figured it out yet. On terms of the “natural way” vs “human constructed society” I fall more in line with the idea of the natural way because like Stoics and Daoists I think that there is a certain orderliness to the mechanisms of the natural world that works better than human constructs such as equality of outcome and the ideas of Hobbes. Now to shift to my post on morality I personally believe that there a certain absolute morality established through a deity because of my Catholic background, but should you remove that I would say that certain moral principles are objectively better than others because of their results and that could establish a true morality as well. When it comes to theology I was also very influenced by my Catholic background, but I also incorporated some lines of secular thought and skepticism into my theological views. I Really liked my nature vs nurture blog post because it’s an idea that really gets to the root of every person’s being and like I said there I thought that human personality and capabilities are established at birth, although how they manifest in life is determined my nurture, and that it’s not such a restricting thing about someone, but rather it acts as a defining characteristic that makes everyone unique. My opinion on Post-Modern philosophy isn’t very positive because I think it offers great deconstruction and criticism and nothing in its place making it rather banal and futile of a philosophy in my opinion. I’ve been very influenced by Stoicism as of late and think that it is an incredible philosophy that everyone should at least explore at little bit (I’d recommend checking out Meditations by Marcus Aurelius if you’re interested). On law I’ve said that I believe it shouldn’t necessarily be ethical and should focus on maintaining the rights of those in the society, while also criticizing religious law being used by a government. And finally on hierarchies, I believe them to be a natural and just occurrence within the world event though it is inherently unequal, these inequalities are how the world naturally functions and to try and create an equal outcome from all of the inequality would only stifle those who are exceptional. Thanks everyone for reading through my blog posts, I hope you’ve learned something about philosophy in reading it and I hope that you will continue to at least consider it in the future.

Mass shootings are the most tragic events that continue to occur and deeply impact the affected communities in our modern world. We, as a society, have been trying to rectify the issue of mass shootings through the two primary legislative goals of gun control and an increase in mental health services, but have either approaches really stemmed this issue? Through viewing the causes for mass shootings we can find a solution that is addressing the illness rather than the symptom. This solution requires the creation of high trust societies that prevent people like Elliot Rodgers, Stephen Paddock and Randy Stair from becoming disenfranchised with society and from committing their heinous acts of violence.

Between modern day conservatives and progressives in the U.S there is one philosophical discussion that completely differentiates the world views of each respective group. These respective philosophies are the belief in natural hierarchies for conservatives and in absolute egalitarianism for progressives. The belief in natural hierarchies by conservatives is one that believes that there will always be groups of people that dominate in nature and in human societies and certain people will reach the top of these hierarchies because they’ve earned it in some way and that is moral. While the belief in absolute egalitarianism by the left is a belief that any type of hierarchy is oppressive to individuals and that any hierarchy should be attempted to be dismantled because people at the top have arbitrarily made it there and to have that is immoral.

In this blog post I’ll be arguing for both those in favor of hierarchies and egalitarianism so I can be the devil’s advocate to some extent, but I do lean towards the idea of hierarchies.

For the case in favor of natural hierarchies many systems assert hierarchies including capitalism and hierarchies are a natural result of great variation between people and things within the natural world. For example, someone who is born with a larger stature and who is naturally athletically gifted will succeed more in basketball than someone with opposite characteristics. Is the aforementioned situation unfair? Yes but that is how natural world is. An antelope within the plains in Africa couldn’t control the fact that they were born as prey yet they were and naturally they are hunted by predators such as lions, within the natural hierarchy of the food chain antelopes are underneath lions; but does this make them lesser beings than lions? No they just have different strengths and weaknesses and that is why the fulfill the role that they have within the food chain. A more modern example of hierarchies would be that of Capitalism. Capitalism is an economic system which wholeheartedly supports the idea of hierarchies because within a free market there will always be those who find success and those who fail based on their own individual merits. Within an absolutely free market some would find great success and others would find abject failure because of their merit and luck, but in today’s society we have the U.S. government to ensure that no one is completely ruined by the free market.

Now to speak in favor of absolute egalitarianism as aforementioned in the final sentence of the last paragraph the U.S. government makes sure that some people won’t completely fail out of the free market and become disenfranchised. Also as I aforementioned it isn’t fair that some people naturally get ahead of others because of factors that they can’t control. Their are two ways to achieve the perfect egalitarian society and one would be to bring those who are at the bottom rungs of the hierarchy up or to bring those at the upper echelons down, this is considered to be moral because it serves the end of fairness and equality between persons. Those who are absolute egalitarians would also argue that all too often minorities and under represented groups are often oppressed by the majority with the hierarchy that they inhabit so the only why to create equality for those disenfranchised minority groups would be to deconstruct the social hierarchy all together.

So ‘ve argued for both philosophies and I’ll leave the rest to the reader, I hope I hadn’t straw manned either belief because I tried my best to fairly represent both parties. I’ll leave you with one question where do you think you fall within these two general philosophies? Of course you might not fully agree with one or the other because they are both extremes but I’m curious none the less.

Law as a concept has always interested me because it’s not necessarily moral and can sometimes be forcibly imposed. Different kinds of law often employ different techniques to uphold authority, two examples being religious law and civil law. Civil law is often separate from morality and it might sound surprising to some, but is all too often true both in totalitarian states and democratic states. For example, in the U.S. if a man is dying of hypothermia right outside of a citizen’s house and that citizen leaves the man outside to die, the state will do nothing to punish the citizen who effectively left the man to die when he easily could have done something. Although the citizen in that situation acted in a morally reprehensible way he had the right to do so because the state can’t coerce a citizen into letting the man in otherwise the state would be violating the citizen’s right to liberty and property. However, if a man were drowning in the harbor and the citizen told everyone in the vicinity that they were going to help the man but you didn’t the government would hold them culpable. the difference in these two scenarios is that the individual in the former example did nothing to create the man’s circumstances and had no direct effect on the man’s death; and in the latter scenario the citizen prevented other bystanders from helping the man and as a result became partly responsible for the drowning man’s death. I believe that these standards within the U.S. legal system are flawed in some ways but are ultimately for the net benefit of society because if the government were to force the citizen in the first scenario to take the man into his house then there would be true right to property and liberty.

Religious law is directly tied to morality because religious law is what dictates morality to a society. Modern post-enlightenment societies have decided to separate religious law from civil law because it could cause unique issues for people practicing morality that differs from the state’s morality. Two perfect examples would be the Catholic Church in Medieval Europe and Islam within some Middle Eastern societies today. In the case of the Catholic Church events like the Italian and Spanish inquisitions took place that would specifically target people of differing religious backgrounds because they undermined the religious and civil authority of the Catholic Church as an institution. The Catholic Church was one of the most powerful institutions in the world at this time and wouldn’t risk losing their religious and moral authority by having challengers to their religious morality in the forms of Judaism and Islam. There was also an Egyptian court case in 1996 held in the high court of Egypt that ruled a certain professor was a heretic of Islam and as a result annulled his marriage to his wife because he was no longer a Muslim. The Egyptian court case is interesting because it is a seemingly secular country but it retains certain archaic laws that forever tie it to the morality of Islam.

During my experiences with both my personal deliberation and the sexual assault deliberation ‘One Alert Too Many: Addressing Sexual Assault through Prevention, Protection, and Prosecution’ I attended as a participant I felt that a multitude of ideas were exchanged. We established such an effective dialogue by means of creating a solid information, prioritizing the key values at stake, weighing the pros, cons and trade-offs between solutions, ensuring mutual comprehension, the equal exchange of ideas and both had participants updating their old opinions.

During my experience moderating my group provided the participants with a plethora of information in favor of different perspectives and the participants provided ample examples of their personal experiences in both public and private schools across different states across the U.S. Being a participant in the sexual assault deliberation I was worried that I would be too ignorant to speak much on certain topics but luckily the group presenting that deliberation provided all participants with detailed papers providing context for the deliberation while allowing for discussion. It was a very different experience walking into the sexual assault deliberation ignorant compared to being entirely prepared for my deliberation.

At my group’s deliberation I found the diversity within our group to be astounding, especially so with the appearance of the geology professor and the journalist from the Penn State alumni paper. All of the students with different backgrounds also made for a dynamic conversation that had a variety of complex and valid ideas even if everyone didn’t agree. And when I was a participant in the sexual assault deliberation I felt encouraged because of the diversity of backgrounds and opinions in the room, because if the room were dominated by a certain group of people with similar backgrounds it would be intimidating to speak because of the argumentative power that they would hold as a group.

When I was leading the deliberation I definitely found the most interesting part was when the group weighed the pros, cons and trade-offs to each groups approach. Sometimes the participants even thought of cons that I hadn’t considered like that sometimes the class discussions that group three established could provide a repressive environment for people dissenting from the popular opinion held by the majority of their peers. In both deliberations I felt that everyone present was effective at ensuring mutual comprehension even after a misunderstanding that occurred between another participant and I in the sexual assault deliberation, but we quickly addressed the error and moved on. I also observed that in the deliberation that I was moderating no particular participants stood out as dominating the conversation and freely exchanged ideas even though some disagreed. The most important factor was that everyone felt comfortable to share their opinion with the whole group that kept the deliberation from being drawn out or awkward.

I believe that in my groups deliberation most participants maintained the same view after the deliberation but I think everyone who attended gained valuable insight as to the opinions and experiences of others that enriched everyone’s understanding of the topic overall. In regards to the sexual assault deliberation that I attended, I learned a great deal about the subject from attending and although my views on the subject hadn’t changed drastically I believe that I have a more nuanced opinion now because of it.

Stoicism is a school of philosophical thought that has influenced my personal philosophical views in profound ways. Recently I’ve been reading a seminal book in stoic philosophy the meditations by the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Throughout the book the ideas of stoicism provide a certain order and positivity to life ed ven though it acknowledges that some things cant be controlled or avoided. The founder of stoicism, zeno of citium, was an affluent merchant until he lost everything he had in a horrible shipwreck. In Zeno’s newfound poverty he found a greater purpose in philosophy and used his experiences to foster a philosophy of order and positivity that would remain throughout the ages. Ultimately stoicism is based on the concept of self improvement with purpose, because stoics reason that for one to truly be improved the must use their newfound strengths to serve their universal purpose. The idea of everything being connected for purpose within the universe is a cornerstone of stoic philosophy and the purposeful connection of everything is known as the logos of the universe. Stoics would then try to serve the universal purpose through achieving actions based on rationality to improve the world. Marcus Aurelius exemplifies the idea of one having a purpose in his questioning “[were you] born to feel ‘nice’? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?”. I found this quote particularly interesting because all too often in today’s world people do things that are well within their comfort zone and will prioritize meaningless indulgences instead of things that are truly important to them and those around them. This idea is primarily why I like stoic philosophy it can provide purpose in our world of modernity that so desperately needs because of the existential vacuum found within america. I would highly recommend anyone reading this to read some stoic philosophical theory because it truly can improve your outlook on life and fosters positivity. I believe a good litmus test to see which ideas work and which ideas don’t is to look at the results of those ideas. And when you compare the philosophy of stoicism to something like nihilism there really is no contest. If you believe in the natural logos of the world and that gives you purpose and you improve the lives of those around you as well as yourself you’re a better person for it. If you believe that life has no inherent purpose and that you should live to do what pleases you because nothing else matters you will end up not growing as a person. So let’s say hypothetically that the belief of stoicism is wrong and that there isn’t any purpose to anything, you would have still lived a positive life because of stoicism, even though your beliefs were “naive”. So now I leave the continued exploration of stoicism to you, the reader, because there is far more complexity to be understood within this philosophy but I hope that this post piqued you interest because i find stoicism extremely fascinating.

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.