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Situation based on Heinz dilemma: There has been a shoot out at a college and there has been several severe injuries. The closest emergency hospital is full: all the OR are full, the emergency room and they had to convert that room into an OR. All the doctors are working on every patients. There are still several patients that are coming in the ER and there is no room left. The police and the doctors find out that the doctors in OR 1 are performing a heart surgery on the shooter. What should the doctors do? Should they continue or leave him to help other patients? There several patients who need surgeries and that OR could be used to save them. What is the moral thing to do?

Honestly morality is such a vast principle. We all might share the same connotation on what morality is, but at the same time it might differ. This is because we have all belong to different cultural backgrounds and when we make a decision about whether it's morally acceptable/appropriate or inappropriate, those factors influence our decision. As aleks and baqar mentioned, the sense of morality differs within people. In my culture, some people might think love marriages are immoral and go against cultural values. I've inherited the same cultural background and values but my sense of morality has been influenced by other cultures. Therefore, i think love marriages are definitely moral. Like discussed earlier, who really decides what's morally right? Will there ever be a mutual sense of morality? Referring to one of the principles mentioned in the article, Altruism. I could relate it to one of the quotes i strongly believe in. 'As you sow so shall you reap' - stated in the Bible.

The article i decided to reflect on is "What Makes Us Moral" because I interestingly realized that the article made me raise more questions than give me answers, that exactly makes us moral. The article explores two kinds of people, which are basically the bad and the good, and tried to link up morality to the actions of certain people. Sometimes morality plays a big part in a person's life and towards what actions they may commit, but sometimes, a person's badness or goodness, can over shadow universal morality. Examples were given at the bottom of page 30 and 31, which both famous and infamous people who have acted and changed the world, whether it was positively or destructively. In the article, there was a very interesting observation made about an example of a child at school. The example was about how the child would react to him having to obey the rule of not eating in class, and of him listening to his teacher if she told him to push another student off his chair. This shows that morality is part of everyone's school of thought, and then determines the actions one will decided to make. Unless someone decides they want to be bad, and want to hurt other people, morality overshadows any kind of bad though, just like the teacher's request of pushing another child of his chair made made the student hesitate, and realize that he had no valid reason to do that, but his teacher's demand. Most people's intentions are good because we all feel like we have a certain standard to live up to, and a limit of a particular behaviour we owe to each other and the people around us. On the other hand, there are always people who aren't as stable, people who suffer from clinical sanity for example, as stated under the section of "Why We Turn Bad". Where morality comes from is still to be researched and understood, because there was never a rule book or "morality" book made in order to mentor the human society, but that hasn't stopped the vast majority of people having common thou

Required Viewing for our ToK Unit on History as an AoK

After watching this video, the first thing that came to my mind was, "wooooow". I really liked the way Mr. David Christian had explained his thoughts and ideas. His analogy of the egg being mush and our complexity being similar was clear in his context. It all also made sense to me about the difference between humans and other species since we have language and a different degree of collective learning. Overall, the video was very instructive, explanatory and very well constructed. That's why even though it seemed to be very confusing and had a sort of overload of information, the way it was represented made it easier for the audience to comprehend. That's why I got the chance to really understand and think about his ideas in depth. The way he studied history and explained it to the audience was most entertaining and educational in my opinion. The reason I think this is because he took a different approach to history. Usually when people refer to history it's focused on human history and what we had done as species. But his approach is very scientifically based and focused which made it more factual which in affect made it make more sense to me. I understood what he meant about the complexity of the world being the base of it's development although I didn't completely understand it.

The most intriguing idea I took from this video was the first concept presented by David Christian - the idea that the general tendency in the universe is for things to go from order to lack of order and entropy. Although he does present this idea in the context of physics through the second law of thermodynamics, I find this a little confusing personally because if I were to think in terms of, say, particle physics, the general tendency is for particles to decay from a high energy state to a low energy state; this could be interpreted as things going from lack of order, to order, contrary to what Christian introduces in his TED talk (do correct me if I'm wrong). However, I do see the error in my thought processing as I realise that if I were to look at things in the context of scientific history, single-cell organisms evolved into multiple-cell organisms, which then developed tissues and organs and so on and so forth. From this perspective, I completely understand the tendency of "mush" going to complexity. Hence, I am a little perplexed at this first premise of the video. I found the Goldilocks condition to be intriguing as well as we see this happen often if we were to look at it in terms of science. For instance, an electronic transition can only occur if you transfer the exact amount of energy to an electron, or the activation energy required for a chemical reaction to occur (you may have noticed my trend to look at things in terms of science). If the model of the universe follows these Goldilocks condition, would it ever be possible to predict the next "threshold" of development? This comes back to the Positivist school of history: the idea that we are able to predict future events based on patterns derived from the past course of history. However, as we established today in class, history may not exactly be predictable, due to inconsistencies and irrationalities of the human mind. Then again, factoring out mankind and its tendency to be illogical

Does this mean that any form of complimenting or encouraging words we give are simply empty and without purpose? Does this mean that giving compliments are simply just a ritual in its entirety? Somehow I don't believe this as I like to believe that there are still genuine feelings expressed to one another in this materialistic world of ours. Perhaps this is my own interpretation but maybe the exchange of these so-called meaningless words are just to actually carry out a civil conversation. I can understand the author's perspective regarding the waiter aspect as when they ask about my food, I simply reply with a "It's delicious" or "Fine, thanks". I see this happen with my parents as well when they are so obviously displeased with their food. Before I proceed onto a tangent about food, one last point. From my perspective, these "empty, but necessary conversations" are just a method of showing proper etiquette as well, as it would simply be rude to ignore a "meaningless" question. Hopefully this comment serves of some purpose.

I think the writer of this article makes some valid points. It is true that all of us say things just for the sake of saying them. Often we ask questions we already know the answer to or we say things that we don't really mean, just to make conversation. However, the author seems to be making fun of the way people do this and so he undermines the importance of 'talking no purpose'. Personally I believe that this 'talk of no purpose' is quite important. It is this talk that allows us to interact with the people we don't already know and it is this talk that makes daily life more comfortable. Imagine a world without no- purpose talk; waiters that serve you and then stare at you instead of asking you how the food is or a half-time team talk in the locker room where the coach just stares at his players instead of saying obvious things like "Play better defense!" Or sitting next to someone on a bus in an uncomfortable silence just because you don't have anything purposeful to say to them. Wouldn't that be awkward? We must also consider the fact that some of the most important relationships in our lives may have started with 'talking no purpose'; Best friends, spouses, girlfriends, boyfriends etc.

Sorry for the late submission, I finally found the comment button :). I found this article very interesting and it made me think a lot about my daily life. I hear these meaningless phrases, which the article refers them to, numerous times every day and only now do I start to question the actual meaning behind these words. I agree with the article to an extent that it seems kind of pointless to ask certain questions if we already know the answers to them, however I disagree with the fact that they are meaningless. Some questions asked by people may come out of habit and maybe the answer doesn't actually interest them, however by asking the question it shows that the person has acknowledged another person which may affect them at a more emotional level. An example for this would probably be the most common expression used, "Hi, how are you?". How often does the person asking actually 'care' whether the person responds with 'good', 'okay' or 'alright'? However, to the other person it may give them a warm feeling because someone has recognized them and put in the effort to 'talk' to them. I think it's the same thing with comments made such as "good luck!", "great job!" and "nice try". I can relate to this very well when I'm playing sports, especially mentally challenging sports such as volleyball, because if I'm not completely focused, it becomes very difficult to play well. For example, if I go up for a hit and end up messing up by hitting the ball out, I would usually get very frustrated , put my head down and stop swinging at the ball. However, if my team mates make comments such as "keep trying", "nice try" or "better luck next time", it really helps to bring my confidence back up and I'll have the courage to go up and swing at another ball. These comments however may come naturally and without great meaning from my team mates, but to me they make a huge difference.

Antonion Damasio is one of the world's leading neuroscientists (Appeal to Authority). Have a look at his take on how your emotions influence your sense of awareness.

I liked most of what he said, but I think that we are no closer to "World Peace" than we were 100/300/10^6 years ago. I think the opposite is true, with our logic being put to further and less productive uses (nuclear/chemical/biological/psychological weapons) we are actually regressing as a species. I also think that the emotions are not simply built upon with logic/reason but also lost with the growth in these areas. With the onslaught of pure reason that we have today I think the loss of feeling has led to a general loss of direction in society and has proven to be just as destructive as illogical and irrational behaviour has been in the past. True, a purely emotional response is often not thought through and is very impulsive; but a purely logical (I would like to say objective/subjective but I think these are not the same things at all) response can lead to dead-ends and the assumption that things must follow fixed rules.

This is an excellent article from al Jazeera, Hareth. Thank you for sharing. While the abstractions of "International Law," generally projected by the United States government, are inherently convoluted and ripe with "double-standards," I still have to admit that I enjoyed my traditional 75-day libations to ease the struggle of international "peace-waging," so to speak.

Welcome to diigo ToK All-Stars! This interesting article from the Washington Post is relevant to our developing discussion on truth, belief, information, and knowledge. You might relate to the research-related conflicts which get discussed In this easy-to-access article.

Required Viewing

I found the ideas presented in Sam Harris' TED talk extremely intriguing and thought-provoking. I was very captivated by his concept of moral-genius in the same fashion as it applies to genius in any other scientific subject area. I found that his ideas accurately applied to the real-world, where people's subjective opinions of morality, fueled by cultural stimulus, interfered with the goal of human well-being. This led me to wonder what the causes of such ideas and actions. I came up with a possible explanation for the phenomenon. Moral questions rely heavily on social aspects which is expected since our sense of morality is shaped by our interactions with our community and ourselves. When we talk of the subject of morality and what we perceive as morally right and morally wrong, we encounter several different distinct, morally correct answers to solve moral problems. There is a certain range of actions that we would distinguish as morally correct. In a scientific-based subject such as physics, as Harris discussed in his presentation, the answers to questions are concrete and precise. This is due to a lack of social interaction in order to achieve an answer, the range of correct answers which is present in moral questions is now eliminated. I believe that this is due to the fact that social interactions are not part of the journey to reach the answer. This allows physicists or people in general to dismiss incorrect answers to questions without hesitation, if an answer is incorrect, a clear demonstration of the faulty logic that caused the deduction of the incorrect answer may be explored. Morality however, may not be explored using the same procedure. People are afraid to point out the faultiness in the deduction of moral answers of other people because they do not want to dismiss the moral beliefs of other people in fear of insulting them by discounting their beliefs. I find this similar to what occurs in a subject such as English. English is also a subject which

I think that what Harris has presented is an interesting point of view, but I think that his viewpoint on moral topics are quite narrow minded, because of the fact if that morals are not determined through scientific concepts. I feel that when he continues to think about these topics he only considers the points of view out of practicality, instead of looking at peoples emotions and the morals that they have based them of off. Personally I believe that morals are based of not only religions, but also the community that people reside in, as often we base what we do on our surroundings, as we don't want to be ostracized by our community. For example, one of the theories Harris offers it to look at the idea of moral leaders just like we have leaders in religion, but I think that what he might fail to understand is that morality, is much more fluid and abstract than basic science, as there are many variables which differ at the same time. I think one of the main problems with having "moral leaders" might be the fact that they will not take the culture into consideration.