The Oracle (E-Journal)
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The Moral Functions of Resentment
Get PDFResentment is a much more complex emotion than it may appear at a first glance. It may play a crucial role in determining how a victim reacts to a wrong done to him or her. As it impacts human choice and judgment, it may influence the lives of the victim and the wrongdoer alike. Because it is manifested in actions that affect others, its significance cannot be underestimated, and its nature and moral function must be understood. Although resentment is commonly attributed to a list of negative or “evil” emotions, a further analysis must be made before it is dismissed as being absolutely morally wrong. This essay will examine and juxtapose several alternative views of resentment, as presented by Nietzsche, Butler, Oakley, and Strawson in their respective works
You Ought To Know Better: Acknowledgement and Epistemic Injustice
Get PDFI would like today to talk about the connection between testimony and social experience, about how the ways one speaks and, moreover, is heard may affect the way in which one may negotiate his or her experience. I would like to see how a discussion regarding the relationships between identities, social groups, prejudices, and knowledge claims may lead to a greater understanding of how who ‘we’ (in a specific socially stratified sense) are may affect what ‘we’ (in both general and specific senses) can know. Examining the relationships between attempts at speaking and being understood, attempts at understanding one’s experience, attempts at negotiating one’s social identity, and attempts at knowing about the world, all with an aim towards virtuous action, will, I hope, provide a space to speak toward both how the ways in which situated individuals attempt to know and how such individuals are situated in society may influence what can be known by both the individuals involved and society at large. Beyond an aim for greater lucidity regarding these relationships, I hope to further suggest ways in which individuals and societies can come to ‘know better’. Such a phrase suggests both a moral and epistemic reading; one may come to normatively ‘know better’ than to consciously participate in epistemically unjust practices (practices that emerge from social prejudices often based upon gender or race), and, as a consequence, both individuals and societies will have an opportunity for a claim on greater, or ‘better’, knowledge
“To Be or Not to Be”: An Essay on the Essence of Suicide: Edited by Louis Chiu
Get PDFIn this essay, I will attempt to argue that at times, suicide can be justified. Using Friedrich Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols as well as my own ideas, I set out to help the reader understand that suicide can in fact be justified because it is done out of free will, death is the same regardless of who you are and no individual can know what you are going through. This essay is meant to change the way society views suicide where rather than it being a selfish act, acknowledging that the individual was suffering a great deal before even considering suicide. Despite it being an extreme way of fixing one’s issues, I set to outline the ways society can avoid making those who consider suicide, selfish. I would like this essay to be seen as a liberating piece of work that helps unify those who suffer and the rest of the world.
 
Analyzing Nozick’s reasons against living in an Experience Machine: Edited by Ronen Cherniavski
Get PDFRobert Nozick’s goal in his chapter on Happiness from The Examined Life is to demonstrate that there is something that we value outside of how our lives feel to us internally. To this end, he introduced the Experience Machine thought experiment. In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, he elaborates on three values that matter in addition to internal experience which ought to dissuade us from plugging in. In this essay I attend to each of the three arguments he posits, arguing that none of Nozick’s three values should convince us as reasons against plugging into the Experience Machine. We are thereby left with no reason against plugging into the machine, and yet dread of plugging in remains. I address this remaining strong conviction against entering the machine. Finally, I address the recent status-quo argument, which suggests the Experience Machine experiment is subject to this bias
The Moral Status of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID): Should Cases of Treatment Resistant Depression Qualify? Edited by Marcus MacKenzie
Get PDFThis paper contains two parts. In Part I, I argue that the provision of medical assistance in dying (MAID) to competent patients with an irremediable illness-causing great suffering is of no greater moral concern than the practice of refusing life-sustaining treatment, as they are both supported by the same fundamental bioethical principles. In Part II, I argue that although MAID is morally permissible in many cases, we should not yet allow MAID for treatment-resistant clinical depression. We currently lack criteria to determine with reasonable certainty if any case of depression is irremediable or not due to missing data and publication bias in the available research evidence on the effectiveness of typical treatment methods. These issues might mislead physicians and patients to judge a given case of depression irremediable when it is not, leading to a premature death which deprives the patient of a real chance of recovery, which constitutes maleficence
What Would a BIV Do Differently? A Pragmatist Defense of Contextualist Fallibilism
No full textIn “Solving the Skeptical Problem”, Keith DeRose offers a contextualist response to a possible formulation of the skeptical hypothesis about knowledge. I will here outline his position in order to demonstrate the potential in the contextualist approach to effectively solve the skeptical puzzle. I will, however, go on to argue that the contextualist response as formulated by DeRose falls short of achieving its persistently elusive goal. In this, I will follow David Lewis, in “Elusive Knowledge”, in order to explain how the type of contextualist solution offered by DeRose is inherently self-defeating. I will then suggest the introduction of a pragmatist understanding of knowledge into the contextualist picture. Shifting towards fallibilism, I will argue that in light of pragmatist considerations, the skeptical puzzle loses much, if not all, of its threatening significance
Stoic Reflections on Thomas Nagel’s Account of Death
Get PDFIs death the greatest of all the evils that man can experience, or can one perceive the end of her existence in a neutral way? For Thomas Nagel, death is an evil because it brings to an end not only the goods of life but also the future possibilities of an individual. He attempts to prove this thesis by responding to three main criticisms of his position. First, how can anything be bad if it is not experienced as bad? If something is bad doesn’t there have to be a subject of experience? Secondly, if death is bad who is it bad for—that is, who is the subject who experiences death? Finally, if we don’t find the billions of years of non-existence before our birth disturbing, why do we find the billions of years after our death worrying? This paper will briefly summarize Nagel’s argument that death is the greatest of evils, while also arguing that his position is implausible because the responses he proposes to the above-mentioned criticisms do not satisfactorily answer the critiques. This paper will also advocate the stoic view that the nature of our reality is such that everything decays with time; nothing lasts forever, and therefore death is a natural part of life with no essentially good or bad qualities.