When is a reason to act mine?
Discussion
In Williams we find a very sophisticated form of a very rough suspicion that some of you probably have, that ethics must somehow be individualistic. Perhaps he has captured for you something which you’ve felt all along – that things like the Principle of Utility and the Categorical Imperative are just too simple.
Yet, maybe this is just because we haven’t thought about those principles hard enough. Railton argues that so long as we recognize that there are many valuable things and we admit that our evaluations need to be up for inspection, then no great problem emerges.
In this post, I’d like you to respond to the following prompt which will hopefully generate some interesting discussion about value:
Occasionally you will hear someone give this absolutely terrible bit of advice: “You should do what makes you happy!” This advice is terrible because it is often given to people who (1) don’t know what would make them happy and (2) are actively trying to seek advice about what to do in order to solve this problem. Given that we want to be happy and sometimes we don’t know what will make us happy, how should we think about our “Ground Projects?”
Imagine that you are assigned the job of giving advice to incoming freshman at Northwest Vista College who do not know what they want to major in and do not know what they are interested in. What would you tell them to do to maximize their chances at being happy in the future?
