Originally Posted by jo87

Its for a take home exam.

Well that's not very moral, having other people do your work for you...

Originally Posted by micadjems

Well that's not very moral, having other people do your work for you...

Yeah, it's not. I just felt like posting something on here that wasn't somehow related to exams. The responses are pretty interesting so far, but I was hoping for a bit more of an argument.

I'll post a new topic soon enough if this one dies early.

Does anyone really do anything for the right reasons? Is their motivation ever noble and self-removed? Or deep seated in their subconscious do they know that they wish others to perceive it as such in order to gain for themselves?

They say absolute power corrupts absolutely and I don't see how one can argue otherwise. If everything was as you wished, what incentive do you have to care? You could fix everything as you pleased anyway if you wanted to.

Has anyone heard of The Panopticon? The Panopticon was a prison devised in 1785 by an English philospher (but I don't remember who). The idea of The Panopticon is that it was a prison essentially without restraints. There was always one all-seeing eye; someone always watching you, but you never know when they are watching becasue they are invisible. Thus, the prisoners wouldn't chance anything for fear that at any moment they could be caught. It was never actually built, but it can be argued that the Panopticon exists today, in another sense. It's really just like the book "1985." Today we are always being watched, by cameras, other people... There are things that we do everyday without even thinking about it that we assume are against the law, although they technically aren't. However, in accordance with societal expectations, we just don't do them. It doesn't even occur to us to do them at all. Sp does the fact that we don't do these things make us moral, or immoral? Moral in the sense that we'd never consider acting on it because it would never occur to us TO act on it, or immoral becasue it's not even there for us to consider?

Btw, I don't know if that makes sense at all; I am so tired right now... but google the Paniopticon if you want. It's interesting.

To answer the original posters question. I'd have to say that i don't attach the word moral to an action that is motivated purely by fear. Just like i don't think that Christians are moral simply because they act nicely purely out of spite for the hypothetical hell they face if they do not.

A moral action to me is a conscious decision to better the lives of everyone around you, even if that is in an abstract sense. Argo, existentialism; the idea that we act as examples for every other human being. If i act a certain way, i am literally promoting that action to the rest of the human race as acceptable.

See: Aristotle - as he believed that there is no such thing as evil, only ignorant individuals who could not foresee the consequences of their actions "no one would willingly perform an evil act if they could understand its ramifications on themselves and others."