affirmative action is a discrimination against the blacks

affirmative action is a discrimination against the blacks and other minorities. Logic goes like this: once AA is enacted, the blacks will leave an impression on the public that now they are the beneficiary of affirmative action. People tend not to trust black people because they feel those blacks receive their position as a privilege but not as qualified candidates. Such atmosphere of suspect will spread and even the qualified blacks will be questioned about their professionality, implicated by those who get a position unqualifiedly. Let me continue to use previous example in the first paragraph to illustrate this point. After hiring process, this company successfully meets the standard of hiring 10% blacks of all staff, even some of them are unqualified or inferior to other whites. In this company, different tasks from different clients are equally allocated to analyst programmers and then send back to their respective clients after completion. But one client finds out that there are always some bugs existed while he was operating the programs completed by one of the black staff in this company. This client begins to be suspicious of this company’s qualification and entrust his programs to other companies. This company thus lose a client this way and its benefits begin to decline. A malign circle begins since then. Decrease in the number of clients leads to decline in profits, decline in profits results in reduction on wages and reduction on wages causes the outflow of talents. In fact, we can not deny the fact that majority of staff, including the blacks, are qualified and complete their clients’ tasks perfectly. But since the imperfection caused by the unqualified black influences this company’s reputation, those qualified staff are indirectly implicated. This is a kind of discrimination against those majority of qualified blacks, although they are not directly targeted to. Furthermore, from this action itself, it emphasizes the conception of majority and minority, race, sex and other ethnical group and perpetuate the alienation and resentment diverse groups thus increasing racial tension.  Because in order to have this action well understood and enacted, clear distinguish should be the first step. Otherwise, once the target of one policy is confused, there is no way to ensure the well implementation of it. So emphasis on different groups and clear classification have already made fusion of various groups much harder and impossible. The conception of racism doesn't fade away but rather enhanced, and ultimately the society will carry on racism, which is a terrible stereotype related to race. Martin Luther King once said, "I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." From this point of view, affirmative action not only fails to achieve the equality of difference race, but rather enhances inequality between different races and creates double discrimination.

Yixuan Wang

Are tariffs on imports morally justified?

I was thinking whether placing tariffs on imports by the government is morally the right thing to do. Amongst the arguments in favour of imports are the benefits to the people on the importing country as they get to enjoy a better and diversified range of products and the profits earned by the foreign companies who are selling to the importing country. Among  the arguments against imports include the excess competition generated by the incoming foreign products in the domestic market which results in many domestic firms to get driven out. Also, the government does not get to earn revenue from tariff which it could utilize it on the citizens of its own country. Now, since there are chances of many domestic firms being driven out of the industry meaning that many poeple will lose jobs, it might seem that according to the egoisitic welfare consequentiliast, tariffs are justified where the agent in consideration is someone from the domestic country who risks losing his or her job. Obviously, a job results in welfare.  However, that being said, with tariffs, the same person who is in risk of losing his job, misses out on the better and diversified range of imported products. So, the agent stays the same but there are contrasting effects on the agent which makes it difficult to anticipate what the egoistic welfare consequentialist will eventually have to say about the moral status of tariffs on imports. Also, what about the overall effects of tariffs on the intrinsic value simpliciter of the universe accorging to universalistic welfare consequentialists?  

Value of Life

In my paper I argue for the desire-satisfaction theory. One of the main counter arguments I encounter

is that a person can desire something that appears negative for them. An example of this would be

someone desiring to self-harm, self-sacrifice, or commit suicide. I argue that another objection to the desire theory is the self-harm, and self-sacrifice “paradox”. The line of argument for this states that if a person self harms, or self sacrifices then it cannot possibly benefit them because they are hurting themselves and that is what they desire thus posing a serious dilemma to desire theorists.[1] I disagree. I do not see a dilemma here, if a person is feeling deep remorse that can only be relieved in their mind by self-harming then by self-harming and fulfilling their desire then they have released their negative feelings and feel happy, even though it did cost a physical injury. Also, a person who self-sacrifices believes that they are going to be rewarded in the afterlife when they sacrifice themselves, and therefore feel that they are happier after they fulfill their self desire through their actions. My argument against these being a paradox is simple. There are medications that are designed to help people who feel they must self-harm, and there is no proof of an existence of an afterlife. So I argue that both these people are being irrational, and are qualified out of the desire theorists explanation that states “If something has fulfilled our informed, self-regarding desires, and we are pleased as a result of this, then that thing is good for us.”[2] These decisions represent ill-informed decisions, and therefore do not qualify under the framework for the desire theory that has been laid out. Suicide also falls under this case, a person contemplating suicide cannot possibly be informed about how to better their life, and therefore cannot be considered to be an informed self-regarding desire.

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[1] FOE 56

[2] FOE 54

Should Physician-Assisted Suicide be permitted or not in the US

It is debatable whether PAS is legally permitted or not. In my opinion, PAS is morally impermissible as the physicians could have the intention to kill the patients.

Let us consider a case to see whether it is a PAS or not.

The patient suffers from emphysema and related heart problems and she wants to refuse any forms of hydration and die. She asked the doctor to support her plan but the physician refuse to do that.

The nature of Physician-Assisted Suicide (PAS) is enabling suicide by providing the deadly means that the patients use to kill themselves. If a doctor provides the deadly means that the patient could use to kill herself, it is considered PAS due to the nature of it. For example, it is illegal for doctor to offer any deadly means such as giving the patient a gun or any lethal medical prescriptions which could cause her to commit suicide. In fact, the patient did not ask the doctor to give her any lethal prescriptions or other deadly means and she has not received any deadly means from the doctor. The doctor has no intention to kill the patient on his part as her physician, he is not aiding in the intentional self-killing of the patient. Instead, the patient decides to stop drinking and refuses any form of medical hydration by her free will. Therefore, doctor’s cooperation should not be considered as PAS due to the nature of his cooperation.

I have 2 questions/issues:

1. In my paper, I have tried to argue that autonomy is intrinsically valuble for itself and that it should be a part of the objective list. That being said a possible objection from a hedonisnt to me would be that whenever I had experienced autonomy, there was also the presence of pleasure and hence my life increased in goodness, all else equal. So now, whenever I am having autonomy, I am quickly jumping to the conclusion that it is autonomy which makes my life better. According to the hedonist, I am mistakenly attributing the increased goodness in life to autonomy. So, how would respond to the hedonist if you are arguing in favor of autonomy?

2. We had discussions regarding fetuses as potential human beings in class and whether it is morally right to do abortion. If I am correct, we could not tell when exactly does a fetus achieve personhood. So if I am not mistaken, an abortion carried out after the fetus achieves personhood is morally wrong.
Now I was actually wondering what happens to moral status of the abortion when the abortion is carried out exactly at the time the fetus is achieving personhood, meaning it is in a transition phase. Any ideas?

Thoughts on whether fetuses are "potential human beings"

For the purposes of discussion, I had an idea to use an analogy of a comatose patient to explore whether fetuses count as actual human beings or just potential human beings. Granted, the idea is kind of rough so I just wanted to see how it would work in practice.

A comatose patient is identified as a "John Doe", which means the hospital does not know the person's identity.Suppose that he has no attachments to anyone; he has no living relatives or friends, and he is amnesiac. Further suppose that the doctors can reliably speculate that John Doe will emerge from the coma in approximately eight to ten months. However, the costs of treating a comatose patient are relatively high. Should the hospital pull the plug on the comatose patient since no one has any attachments to him? Or should the hospital keep the comatose patient alive?

If you answered that the comatose patient should be kept alive, then presumably you should answer that a fetus should be kept alive as well. As a comatose patient who is amnesiac and without attachment, John Doe is basically like a fetus in the following ways: (i) he has approximately the same limited cognitive functioning more or less (ii) he has no attachments to anyone, (iii) he has no memory of experiences (iv) and if someone killed him, he presumably would not feel much pain.

Perhaps the real issue with abortion are the costs that are imposed on the pregnant woman. If these costs are dealt with, perhaps the issue of aborting fetuses may not be necessary. What if people were legally required to treat pregnant women no different from other women? That is, what if a person could be prosecuted for child abuse if he/she discriminated against a pregnant woman, because it would start a chain of events that would lead to abortion?

What do you think? 

Sophie's Choice

I'm addressing kind of an interesting moral dilemma for my final paper. Basically, I'm evaluating the moral implications of Sophie's choices in the movie "Sophie's Choice." For those of you not familiar with the movie, Sophie and her two children are in a concentration camp and a Nazi gives her two choices. She can either 1) Choose one of her children to be killed and the other one will be spared. Or 2) She can refuse to choose either of her children to be sacrificed and the Nazi will kill both of them.

Obviously this is a really morbid moral dilemma and neither decisions seems particularly great. I'm basically arguing (kind of un-popularly) that the best thing for Sophie to do is to refuse to sacrifice either of her children, which effectively leads to both of their deaths. My basic argument is that Sophie is faced with two conflicting obligations. The first is the obligation to save as many children as possible and the second is to refuse to betray or abandon either of her children. Essentially, I think that the second obligation is more important (because of the idea of trust. If Sophie chooses to sacrifice one of her children, she is betraying the trust that she shares with her children) and ultimately trumps the first obligation and she should therefore choose the second of the Nazi's options.

Most people hear this and get really upset and don't understand how I could condone the loss of two innocent lives when one could have been prevented. This is the most simple explanation of my thought process. If Sophie chooses one of her children to be killed, she has directly caused that child's death because it was her decision. If she refuses to choose either of her children to be sacrificed, she is sticking with her children and the only person who can be blamed for the death of the children is the Nazi who chose to kill the children. I'm also using Immanuel Kant's theories regarding the universalizability of the maxim as well as the notion that you cannot treat humans as mere means to further support my argument (I think that Kant would arrive at the same conclusion).

Obviously this is a really simplified version of my argument and I'm leaving out a ton of details and reasoning. But does anyone have any thoughts about my argument? Even if you don't agree with me, I think that it's thought provoking at the very least.