A bit of backstory. I am a Psych major, and I am writing a series of papers dealing with the roles we play in our lives and the responsibilities we have to our self and to other human beings, as well as other life in general.
I am looking for any views that attribute to you, as a Human being, paying specific attention to your role in your environment, the global environment and how your actions either deter or aid the advancement of any or all positive human growth.
If i was to say to you that Humans who desire to reproduce serve a greater cause to humanity then those who choose not to reproduce. How does this affect your personally? Someone who has children could possibly answer wildly different to someone who doe not have kids, as well as someone who does not desire children.
on a more base level, you can respond by saying that humans are just animals and are truly meant to survive, provide for their own, and procreate.
I am generally looking for a response to the general question:
"As a human being, my responsibilities to myself and other humans are.........."
and possibly elaborating on your particular examples.
seems like this thread is fading quickly but i figured i would go ahead and chime in. this may be a bit off topic but for my philosophy class i wrote a paper on how we dont need religion in order to live a morally righteous life. in trying to establish that religion and morality are seperate i decided to explain to people that in order for us to survive as a society we had certain duties and laws that we had to do/abide by.
think back to when first humans walked. there was no cognitive reasoning between right and wrong maybe and one person stole from someone else. well that guy said "hey, i dont like that, thats mine, dont take it" so there came upon "maybe i shouldnt steal from people because that effects me in a negative way. so in order to advance as a society we all have to work and live amongst one another and try our best to keep harmony by setting up the set of laws. now how it relates to you is that we all help further society by living and cooperating with one another. but what makes a human? we all have a basic instict to survive. in order for use to survive we do whats best for us which is get along with others. also now-a-days we have to go to work and make money so we can support a family and so on and so forth.
you picked a topic that can be talked a lot about.
by the way. i think we can all agree that there are some people who do want to reproduce for the purpose of having children and there are people who solely want to do the act of reproducing for pleasure only and dont want childrent. now you say that people who desire to reproduce serve a greater purpose to humanity than those who dont... well what if the people who desire to reproduce are horrible people who have a large chance of creating another demon spawn? then i think they would be doing humanity justice if they didnt want to have kids.
i remember reading a brillian thippie philosopher named steven gaskin.
he started 'the farm'.
he said the purpose of people was to combat entropy, to shovel shit against the time forever.
cheers.
I got my BA in Psych in 2003 & so I feel your pain. In my view, I don't know if we have a responsibility to anyone or anything. Responsibility seems like such a smug word...almost. (but that could just be my mood at the moment) I personally feel like we SHOULD be be cognisant of other beings on this planet; that we should try to be decent fucking entities. And by that I mean, do as little harm as possible. This question is so vast & it seems that whatever sentence I try to write next, is mired in philisophical conundrums.
And so I say at last, good luck to you. I don't miss school one bit.
studderingdave
Bangor, PA
September 2004
JUN 26, 2010 09:10 PM