So What?

Our focus on who decides what is morally right this semester has changed the way I view my own life and the world around me.  I have a wider view of honesty in culture and the way I understand my life because of the articles and book we've read, the movie we've seen, and the group discussions we've had.

It's changed how I view honesty in culture by challenging whether truthfulness is best for the situations at hand.  When looking at a situation from a perspective of virtue ethics, I would need to decide whether honesty, or preservation of a situation or someone's feelings is more important.  It brings to mind the situation from our classic categories reading about the angry men looking for the man's friend.  In a duty-based state of mind, I would make my decisions on the moral basis of following set rules.  While I do tend to be a rule-follower, I think I stick to my original statement that I more often decide based on my personal virtues.  Finally, from a consequentialist standpoint, I would need to take into account possible outcomes of each action.  While this makes logical sense to me, it's probably the most difficult.  Instead of staying true to who I know I am, or following clear guidelines, this mindset requires me to make assumptions about possible outcomes.  With all situations, one never knows whether the decision they've made is one they can consider moral themselves, until they see its outcome.

Overall, I think these arguments have made me more aware of the fact that even if I disagree with a decision someone else makes on moral grounds, I now remind myself that they have reasoning for why they're doing something they believe is right.  Just because we all have different motivations and ways of reaching moral decisions, doesn't mean one is necessarily better than any other.  We each decide things differently because we as people are different, and we choose based on the method that works best for who we are and how we operate within our daily lives.

I think my new understanding is also going to change the way I understand my own life and how I make decisions, because I now analyze what the motivation is behind my major decisions.  I think that knowing what motivates me to act a certain way - whether it's who I am, authority, or end results - will help me not only to know myself better, but to convict myself in doing the right thing more often.  For example, in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Jekyll refused to admit to himself the real motivation behind his reasoning in creating the potion.  He claimed it was a noble cause, but it was really for selfish intent, so that he could keep his private life and public reputation both intact.  Perhaps if he'd considered why he chose to do this, he would've realized it wasn't exactly a great idea.  The same can be said for Source Code, which took an in-depth look into how our perspective on a situation can change our actions, even though we still have morally good intentions either way.  I think the analysis of this movie also helped me understand that I need to look at points of view other than my own and remember that none of us sees ourselves as the villains of our own stories.

All in all, this has been a really interesting topic of discussion and analysis.  Looking into how we each make our moral decisions in different ways, as well as the motivations behind said decisions, has changed the way I look at my own life as well as the world around me.