Intro to Philosophy: Media Critique

Instructions

Media critique: For this final media critique, you’ll be making a multimedia piece rather than analyzing a form of media philosophically.

Linked to course goal:

A) Be familiar with the concepts of the various philosophers, philosophical traditions and philosophical periods we have studied;

Linked to unit objectives:

*To understand major concepts (utilitarianism, virtue etc.) associated with ethical philosophy

*To consider the pragmatic usage of ethical philosophy

Directions: Create a four-to-six-minute video, uploaded as a YouTube file, that answers the following prompt on John Stuart Mill. Speak naturally on camera, and do not read verbatim from notes. The recording should be made in one software (say, QuickTime), then transferred over to YouTube for a URL. Upload the URL as your assignment, and make the file ‘public’ or ‘unlisted.’

Prompt: Consider the following two paragraphs from John Stuart Mill’s treatise “On Utilitarianism.” Remember that Mill is the one who argues in the via negativa mode. Much of the tension in ethical philosophy centers on how individual wants and desires clash with those of the whole. How does Mill reconcile individualism with the collective or societal whole in the passage below? How does the Golden Rule come into play here? At the end, consider whether you think that Mill’s notions of individualism and collective utility or good are indeed achievable.

“Meanwhile, let utilitarians never cease to claim the morality of self devotion as a possession which belongs by as good a right to them, as either to the Stoic or to the Transcendentalist. The utilitarian morality does recognise in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others. It only refuses to admit that the sacrifice is itself a good. A sacrifice which does not increase, or tend to increase, the sum total of happiness, it considers as wasted. The only self-renunciation which it applauds, is devotion to the happiness, or to some of the means of happiness, of others; either of mankind collectively, or of individuals within the limits imposed by the collective interests of mankind.

I must again repeat, what the assailants of utilitarianism seldom have the justice to acknowledge, that the happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent’s own happiness, but that of all concerned. As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator. In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as you would be done by, and to love your neighbour as yourself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality. As the means of making the nearest approach to this ideal, utility would enjoin, first, that laws and social arrangements should place the happiness, or (as speaking practically it may be called) the interest, of every individual, as nearly as possible in harmony with the interest of the whole; and secondly, that education and opinion, which have so vast a power over human character, should so use that power as to establish in the mind of every individual an indissoluble association between his own happiness and the good of the whole; especially between his own happiness and the practice of such modes of conduct, negative and positive, as regard for the universal happiness prescribes; so that not only he may be unable to conceive the possibility of happiness to himself, consistently with conduct opposed to the general good, but also that a direct impulse to promote the general good may be in every individual one of the habitual motives of action, and the sentiments connected therewith may fill a large and prominent place in every human being’s sentient existence. If the, impugners of the utilitarian morality represented it to their own minds in this its, true character, I know not what recommendation possessed by any other morality they could possibly affirm to be wanting to it; what more beautiful or more exalted developments of human nature any other ethical system can be supposed to foster, or what springs of action, not accessible to the utilitarian, such systems rely on for giving effect to their mandates” (53-54).