Non Cognitive Essay

Jaida Simmons

Charles Davis

Phil 201 Ethics & Good Life

2/16/2018

Non Cognitive Essay

`         Imagine a pill or therapy capable of rewiring your neural circuitry so as to make you more empathetic, the pill will decrease aggression, and cause your capacity for moral reasoning and tendency to forgive to go through the roof. Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we were all encouraged to have it? I definitely believe human happiness would make this world a better place. why not embrace utopia and prescribe it by force? So, should we make everyone ‘normal’? I believe we should I think there would be less conflict in the world. If everyone is the same what is there to argue about? Human happiness would be a non-cognitive skill, it would be non-cognitive because happiness starts at the work place or at home, really it starts within you!  

According to David Humes the theory of the mind, the passions are impressions rather than ideas (www.plato.standford.edu) The direct passions, which include desire, aversion, hope, fear, grief, and joy, are those that “arise immediately from good or evil, from pain or pleasure” that we experience or think about in prospect. Such as the bodily appetites and the desires that good come to those we love and harm to those we hate, which do not proceed from pain and pleasure but produce them (www.plato.standford.edu). The indirect passions, primarily pride, humility, love and hatred, are generated in a more complex way, but still one involving either the thought or experience of pain or pleasure. Intentional actions are caused by the direct passions. Of the indirect passions Hume says that pride, humility, love and hatred do not directly cause action; it is not clear whether he thinks this true of all the indirect passions (www.plato.standford.edu). I don’t believe there should be any fear or grief in this world I believe it should all be happiness; it might be a little boring but it is nothing we can’t adjust to. And we would be adjusting for the better.

        Alfred Ayers had a different belief than I he believes in truth, knowledge, perception. There is no ‘real’ relation of truth, and so no problem of truth for philosophers to worry about. Similarly, when we say a proposition is probable, or probably true, we are not assigning any intrinsic property to the proposition, nor saying that there is any relation it bears to any other proposition (www.plato.standford.edu). In an article Ayer’s wrote he asked “does our existence have purpose” and that goes back to my belief (www.reasonandmeaning.com). Why are we living if there is no purpose? That is why I believe happiness is needed everywhere if you are happy then you have a purpose in this life! You are living, you are achieving things and everything is great. Happiness everywhere is what this world needs to be a successful place.    

        George Moore had some different beliefs than me also, he believed in The Refutation of Idealism. In The Refutation of Idealism, a book Moore wrote. Moore rejected the core principle of idealism and offered a distinctly realistic alternative. Every form of idealism, he noted, relies on the principle expressed by Berkeley the phrase he used most was, esse est percipi, "to be is to be perceived." This belief that everything is really just an object of experience in some mind. Moore pointed out, must be necessarily true in order to have its intended consequences for the idealist scheme. Yet it seems clear that the belief is not analytic, since there is at least a conceptual difference between being on the one hand and being perceived on the other (www.philosophypages.com). Moore believed in happiness also, but not happiness for everyone else happiness for himself, and to me that is just selfish. As a philosopher I believe you are speaking for your people not just for yourself, and Moore failed to do so. He spoke for himself only.