Sense

of the
Self
 Activity2
Discuss among your groups the problems provided for you. Give a solution to your answer.
Should you, who use social media(Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok) allow
your parents to monitor your social media activities, if not your gadgets will be taken
away from you?
Would you sell your item (gadgets, vehicle) without disclosing all known negative
details, if not you would not have the money for a very important event you have
planned for a year?
Should you tell your significant other the painful truth of you having cheated once
that may cause your relationship or tell a beautiful lie to save your relationship?

You witnessed your sibling who got involved in an accident that caused serious harm to
your long time life rival. Would you report the accident to authorities leading to your
sibling’s arrest or not?
You hold the budget for your company’s yearly team outing with the rule to minimize the
expense on alcoholic beverage. You found a good resort for the event for a much cheaper
price. And you used the money to buy more food and booze. What would you have done?
Learning objective
• Recognize a moral dilemma.
• Identify the three (3) levels of moral
dilemmas.
• Strengthen one’s resolve and moral principles.
• Recognize the problem with taking a subjectivist
stance towards ethics
• Assess the challenge to ethics raised by ethical
egoism
 Moral dilemma
complex situations where a person must (forced to)
choose between two or more conflicting values or
ethical principles. These situations often involve
difficult decisions where one option may result in a
positive outcome, but at the expense of another value
or principle.
 Levels
Of
moral dilemma
• PERSONAL
• ORGANIZATIONAL
• INSTITUTIONAL
 Levels of moral dilemma

Personal – experienced and resolved on the individual or personal level.

Most moral dilemmas belong, or boil, to this level.(Heinz dilemma,
Ectopic Pregnancy)
 Levels of moral dilemma

Organizational – experienced and resolved by social organizations

include those in the medical, business, and public sectors.
(hospital believes life should not be shortened)
 Levels of moral dilemma

Structural – involve a network of institutions and operative

theoretical paradigms. They usually encompass multi-sectoral
organizations and instituions. They may be larger in scope and extent
than organizational moral dilemma
 features of a moral dilemma

the agent is required to do each of two (or more) actions; the

agent can do each of the actions; but the agent cannot do
both (or all) of the actions; The agent thus seems condemned
include
to moral failure; no matter what she does, she will do
something wrong (or fail to do something that she ought to
do).
 Jean-Paul Sartre
born June 21, 1905, Paris, France
died April 15, 1980, Paris
EXISTENTIALISM SALIENT
POINTS
1.THE ABSURDITY OF THE WORLD
2. THE ABUNDANCE OF FREEDOM
3. WE SHOULDN’T LIVE IN BAD FAITH
4.WE’RE FREE TO DISMANTLE CAPITLISM
 The absurdity
Existence precedes essence
Our birth happens first, then it is up to each of us to determine who we are (our essence). We
have no actual pre-determined purpose. No set path to follow.

We are each born in this world

with the lack of real inherent
The meaninglessness in the
world.
The absurd importance.

man continues to search for an answer in an answerless world

 "Man first of all exists, encounters
himself, surges up in the world – and
defines himself afterward.
If man, as the existentialist conceives him,
is indefinable, it is because at first he is
nothing. Only afterward will he be
something, and he himself will have
made what he will be.”

We spend our entire lives creating our own

essence. Developing who we are. Our
essence is develop through our choices.
 ON The abundance OF FREEDOM

Its not the world that lacks of meaning but it’s the terrifying
abundance of freedom

If there are NO GUIDELINES for our

ACTIONS, then each of us is FORCED to
design our OWN MORAL CODE, to invent a
MORALITY to live by
“we are condemned to be free.”

“Angoisse” means anguish

WE SHOULDN’T LIVE IB BAD FAITH
BAD FAITH Is the phenomenon of living WITHOUT
taking account FREEDOM.

We are in BAD FAITH when It is BAD FAITH to insist

we have to tell ourselves that we have to do a
things have to be in a certain particular work, live with a
way and shot our eyes to specific person, or live in a
other options certain place.
 WE’RE FREE TO DISMANTLE
CAPITALISM
CAPITALISM

A giant machine designed to create a sense of necessity

which doesn’t infact exist in reality

Things don’t have to be the way they are! We should

accept the fluidity of our existence, create institutions
habits outlooks and ideas. And relieve ourselves form the
idea that we have a pr-ordained purpose and meaning.
 SUBJECTIVISM

Rene Descartes George Berkeley

 It is the theory that states that
perception or consciousness is reality
There is no underlying, true reality that exists
independent of perception

SUBJECTIVISM claims that the

nature of reality is dependent on the
consciousness of the individual
The nature and existence of every object depends
solely on someone's subjective awareness of it.

Ex: “beauty is in the eye of the

beholder”
 Rene Descartes (Father of Modern Philosophy)
born March 31, 1596, La Haye, Touraine, France
died February 11, 1650, Stockholm, Sweden

‘cogito ergo sum’

‘I think, therefore I am’

Theist Rationalist
 He believes that the grace that is necessary
for salvation can be earned and that human beings are
virtuous and able to achieve salvation when they do their
best to find and act upon the truth.

Free will is the sign of God in human nature, and

human beings can be praised or blamed according
to their use of it. People are good only to the extent
that they act freely for the good of others; such
generosity is the highest virtue.
METHODIC DOUBT a way of searching for
certainty by systematically though tentatively
doubting everything
used to reach certain knowledge of self-
existence in the act of thinking, expressed in
the indubitable proposition cogito, ergo
sum (“I think, therefore I am”).

“i think, therefore I exist!”

 The Criterion of Truth

“That which one ‘clearly’ and

‘distinctly’ perceives”
GEORGE BERKELEY
Subjective Idealism
born March 12, 1685, Ireland
died January 14, 1753, Oxford, England)

The natural world as a language through

which God speaks to man, instructing
him in ways of caring for himself,
enabling him to predict the future, or
some of it, and teaching him how he
ought to act.
SUBJECTIVE IDEALISM

a philosophy based on the premise that nothing

exists except minds and spirits and their
perceptions or ideas.
Existing things of the world
are of two sorts,

Minds and Bodies

Esse est percipi: to be is to be perceived

Ordinary objects are only collections of ideas,

which are mind-dependent. There are no material
substances. There are only finite mental substances
and an infinite mental substance, namely, God.
 The likeness principle

Ordinary objects are only collections of ideas,

which are mind-dependent. There are no material
substances. There are only finite mental substances
and an infinite mental substance, namely, God.
Let us play a game. To concretize the philosophy of G.
Berkeley, guess these things by drawing them without
researching on the net.
1. Platypus
2. Vuvuzela
3. Menorah
4. axolotl
5. Acnestis
Congratulations! You just finished an experiment on G.
Berkeley’s philosophy, ‘esse est percipi.’
Ethical Egoism, a doctrine according to which we have a
duty to promote the good of humanity because God, our
universally benevolent creator,
wants us to do so.
Ethical Egoism, an ethical theory according to which moral
decision making should be guided entirely by self-interest.
Ethical Egoism, an ethical theory according to which moral
decision making should be guided entirely by self-interest.

Ethical egoism is often equated with selfishness, the

disregard of others’ interests in favor of one’s own
interests. However, ethical egoism cannot be
coherently equated with selfishness because it is
often in one’s self-interest to help others or to refrain
from harming them
 Ayn Rand
Born on February 2, 1905
Died on March 6, 1982
Man’s Highest Moral Purpose Is His Own Happiness
Rand’s Ethical Theory: Rational
Egoism
The Virtue of Selfishness

is a collection of essays presenting Ayn Rand's radical

moral code of rational selfishness and its opposition
to the prevailing morality of altruism
A self-interested person, on the traditional view,
will not consider the interests of others and so
will slight or harm those interests in the pursuit of his
own.

Rand’s view is that the exact opposite is true:

Self-interest, properly understood, is the
standard of morality and selflessness is the
deepest immorality.
Self-interest, is to see oneself as
an end in oneself.
one’s own life and happiness are one’s highest
values, and that one does not exist as a servant or slave
to the interests of others.
Our capacity for reason is what enables us to survive and
flourish.
Our capacity for reason is what
enables us to survive and
flourish.
Altruism means sacrificing your
interest over other.

Altruism is evil,
immoral