Moral Actions Essay -- Philosophy Essays

Moral Actions Honesty and deceit. Compassion and Neglect. Benevolence and malevolence. All these hold the extremes in the spectrum of morality. From the general societal viewpoint, the former represents the attitudes which should be admired, rewarded and emulated, while the last mentioned represents the attitudes which should be abhorred, punished and discouraged. Now philosophers, non being satisfied with leave things well enough alone, endeavour to discover why this is so. Why do we admire acts of kindness? Why do we loathe acts of malice? It is broadly thought that the crux of this incertitude of morality has to do with the magnitude of selfishness accounted for in the acts and thoughts of individuals. If we can think of selfishness as an empirical property, honesty, compassion, and benevolence argon acts and attitudes that c wholly for much less selfishness than their moral opposites. This realization, of course, does not answer the question we are considering, it merely pushes it back one metaphysical level. So the revised question should be this When is selfishness morally acceptable, and when is it not? Nietzsche, in proposing that selfishness is, in a sense, solely free of moral blame at all, comes to a conclusion that is altogether opposite to the rest of the philosophers that we have studied. We shall see that Nietzsche is probably on the rightfulness track, and that selfishness is a faulty gauge of the morality of an action, and that morality is simply an illusive concept created by the individuals of society to prevent harm to themselves. We have all seen it before. The African savanna. A cheetah. A pack of grazing gazelles. The cheetah stealthily approaches toward the pack of grazing gazelles. N... ... of when selfish acts are morally permissible, we have commencement established that all sane actions are selfish in origin, and at that placefore, selfishness cannot be procedured as a stones throwment of moral ity. Secondly, the standard of morals which we use to gauge themorality of an action is based on our own selfish appetency for personal power. As established by Nietzsche, actions done in the sideline of personal power are natural, and therefore, from our own viewpoint, these actions are never objectionable. It is sole(prenominal) when seen from anothers perspective that these actions can be seen to be despicable because it threatens their personal pursuit for power. Therefore, the actions that others find objectionable are the actions performed by us that do not involve stealing personal power away from another. In this case, there is no definite set of morals that one can measure their actions to.