University of Central Oklahoma Final Exam Apology Essay Write at least four paragraphs about one thing you studied in this class that really grabbed your a

University of Central Oklahoma Final Exam Apology Essay Write at least four paragraphs about one thing you studied in this class that really grabbed your attention (whether because you agreed with it, thought it was wrong, or simply thought it was interesting). Why did it get your attention? If you agreed with it, why did you agree with it? If you disagreed with it, why did you disagree? If you thought it was interesting, why? If you could communicate the most important thing about this topic to others, what in your opinion would it be?

Please choose one of those topics below to write about it and make sure to mention each part of the question. It doesn’t matter how many words or pages as long as you have 4 paragraphs and answer each part of the question. I uploaded a file about each topic to help you get some ideas about them.

1. The Ring of Gyges.

2. Apology.

3. Aristotle.

4. Utilitarianism.

5. William James’ Theory of Self. The Ring of Gyges, Book II of the Republic
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl201/modules/Philosophers/Plato/plato_dialogue_the_ring_of_g
yges.html
“They say that to do injustice is, by nature, good; to suffer injustice, evil; but that the evil is
greater than the good. And so when men have both done and suffered injustice and have had
experience of both, not being able to avoid the one and obtain the other, they think that they had
better agree among themselves to have neither; hence there arise laws and mutual covenants; and
that which is ordained by law is termed by them lawful and just. This they affirm to be the origin
and nature of justice; –it is a mean or compromise, between the best of all, which is to do
injustice and not be punished, and the worst of all, which is to suffer injustice without the power
of retaliation; and justice, being at a middle point between the two, is tolerated not as a good, but
as the lesser evil, and honoured by reason of the inability of men to do injustice. For no man who
is worthy to be called a man would ever submit to such an agreement if he were able to resist; he
would be mad if he did. Such is the received account, Socrates, of the nature and origin of
justice.
Now that those who practice justice do so involuntarily and because they have not the power to
be unjust will best appear if we imagine something of this kind: having given both to the just and
the unjust power to do what they will, let us watch and see whither desire will lead them; then we
shall discover in the very act the just and unjust man to be proceeding along the same road,
following their interest, which all natures deem to be their good, and are only diverted into the
path of justice by the force of law. The liberty which we are supposing may be most completely
given to them in the form of such a power as is said to have been possessed by Gyges the
ancestor of Croesus the Lydian. According to the tradition, Gyges was a shepherd in the service
of the king of Lydia; there was a great storm, and an earthquake made an opening in the earth at
the place where he was feeding his flock. Amazed at the sight, he descended into the opening,
where, among other marvels, he beheld a hollow brazen horse, having doors, at which he
stooping and looking in saw a dead body of stature, as appeared to him, more than human, and
having nothing on but a gold ring; this he took from the finger of the dead and re ascended. Now
the shepherds met together, according to custom, that they might send their monthly report about
the flocks to the king; into their assembly he came having the ring on his finger, and as he was
sitting among them he chanced to turn the collet of the ring inside his hand, when instantly he
became invisible to the rest of the company and they began to speak of him as if he were no
longer present. He was astonished at this, and again touching the ring he turned the collet
[decorative front of the ring] outwards and reappeared; he made several trials of the ring, and
always with the same result-when he turned the collet inwards he became invisible, when
outwards he reappeared. Whereupon he contrived to be chosen one of the messengers who were
sent to the court; where as soon as he arrived he seduced the queen, and with her help conspired
against the king and slew him, and took the kingdom. Suppose now that there were two such
magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other; no man can be imagined to
be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice. No man would keep his hands off
what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into
houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in
all respects be like a God among men. Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the
unjust; they would both come at last to the same point. And this we may truly affirm to be a great
proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him
individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he
is unjust. For all men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual
than justice, and he who argues as I have been supposing, will say that they are right. If you
could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong
or touching what was another’s, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched
idiot, although they would praise him to one another’s faces, and keep up appearances with one
another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice.”
*Online Source: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin10.htm
The Principles of Psychology
William James (1890)
CHAPTER X.
The Consciousness of Self.
Let us begin with the Self in its widest acceptation, and follow it up to its most
delicate and subtle form, advancing from the study of the empirical, as the Germans
call it, to that of the pure, Ego.
The Empirical Self or Me.
The Empirical Self of each of us is all that he is tempted to call by the name of me.
But it is clear that between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line
is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we
feel and act about ourselves. Our fame, our children, the work of our hands, may be as
dear to us as our bodies are, and arouse the same feelings and the same acts of reprisal
if attacked. And our bodies themselves, are they simply ours, or are they us? Certainly
men have been ready to disown their very bodies and to regard them as mere vestures,
or even as prisons of clay from which they should some day be glad to escape.
We see then that we are dealing with a fluctuating material. The same object being
sometimes treated as a part of me, at other times as simply mine, and then again as if I
had nothing to do with it at all. In its widest possible sense, however, a man’s Self is
the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers,
but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his
reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account. All these
things give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if
they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down, – not necessarily in the same degree
for each [p. 292] thing, but in much the same way for all. Understanding the Self in
this widest sense, we may begin by dividing the history of it into three parts, relating
respectively to 1. Its constituents;
2. The feelings and emotions they arouse, — Self-feelings;
3. The actions to which they prompt, — Self-seeking and Self-preservation.
1. The constituents of the Self may be divided into two classes, those which make up
respectively –
(a) The material Self;
(b) The social Self;
(c) The spiritual Self; and
(d) The pure Ego.
(a) The body is the innermost part of the material Self in each of us; and certain parts
of the body seem more intimately ours than the rest. The clothes come next. The old
saying that the human person is composed of three parts – soul, body and clothes – is
more than a joke. We so appropriate our clothes and identify ourselves with them that
there are few of us who, if asked to choose between having a beautiful body clad in
raiment perpetually shabby and unclean, and having an ugly and blemished form
always spotlessly attired, would not hesitate a moment before making a decisive
reply.[1] Next, our immediate family is a part of ourselves. Our father and mother, our
wife and babes, are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. When they die, a part of
our very selves is gone. If they do anything wrong, it is our shame. If they are
insulted, our anger flashes forth as readily as if we stood in their place. Our home
comes next. Its scenes are part of our life; its aspects awaken the tenderest feelings of
affection; and we do not easily forgive the stranger who, in visiting it, finds fault with
its arrangements or treats it with contempt. All these different things are the objects of
instinctive preferences coupled with the most important practical interests of life. We
all have a blind impulse to watch over our body, to deck it with clothing of [p. 293] an
ornamental sort, to cherish parents, wife and babes, and to find for ourselves a home
of our own which we may live in and ‘improve.’
An equally instinctive impulse drives us to collect property; and the collections thus
made become, with different degrees of intimacy, parts of our empirical selves. The
parts of our wealth most intimately ours are those which are saturated with our labor.
There are few men who would not feel personally annihilated if a life-long
construction of their hands or brains – say an entomological collection or an extensive
work in manuscript – were suddenly swept away. The miser feels similarly towards his
gold, and although it is true that a part of our depression at the loss of possessions is
due to our feeling that we must now go without certain goods that we expected the
possessions to bring in their train, yet in every case there remains, over and above this,
a sense of the shrinkage of our personality, a partial conversion of ourselves to
nothingness, which is a psychological phenomenon by itself. We are all at once
assimilated to the tramps and poor devils whom we so despise, and at the same time
removed farther than ever away from the happy sons of earth who lord it over land
and sea and men in the full-blown lustihood that wealth and power can give, and
before whom, stiffen ourselves as we will by appealing to anti-snobbish first
principles, we cannot escape an emotion, open or sneaking, of respect and dread.
(b) A man’s Social Self is the recognition which he gets from his mates. We are not
only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate
propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind. No more
fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that
one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the
members thereof. If no one turned round when we entered, answered when we spoke,
or minded what we did, but if every person we met ‘cut us dead,’ and acted as if we
were non-existing things, a kind of rage and impotent despair would ere long well up
in us, from which the [p. 294] cruellest bodily tortures would be a relief; for these
would make us feel that, however bad might be our plight, we had not sunk to such a
depth as to be unworthy of attention at all.
Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who
recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind. To wound any one of these his
images is to wound him.[2] But as the individuals who carry the images fall naturally
into classes, we may practically say that he has as many different social selves as there
are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a
different side of himself to each of these different groups. Many a youth who is
demure enough before his parents and teachers, swears and swaggers like a pirate
among his ‘tough’ young friends. We do not show ourselves to our children as to our
club-companions, to our customers as to the laborers we employ, to our own masters
and employers as to our intimate friends. From this there results what practically is a
division of the man into several selves; and this may be a discordant splitting, as
where one is afraid to let one set of his acquaintances know him as he is elsewhere; or
it may be a perfectly harmonious division of labor, as where one tender to his children
is stern to the soldiers or prisoners under his command.
The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have is in the mind of the person one
is in love with. The good or bad fortunes of this self cause the most intense elation and
dejection – unreasonable enough as measured by every other standard than that of the
organic feeling of the individual. To his own consciousness he is not, so long as this
particular social self fails to get recognition, and when it is recognized his
contentment passes all bounds.
A man’s fame, good or bad, and his honor or dishonor, are names for one of his social
selves. The particular social self of a man called his honor is usually the result of one
of those splittings of which we have spoken. It is his image in the eyes of his own ‘set,’
which exalts or con- [p. 295] demns him as he conforms or not to certain requirements
that may not be made of one in another walk of life. Thus a layman may abandon a
city infected with cholera; but a priest or a doctor would think such an act
incompatible with his honor. A soldier’s honor requires him to fight or to die under
circumstances where another man can apologize or run away with no stain upon his
social self. A judge, a statesman, are in like manner debarred by the honor of their
cloth from entering into pecuniary relations perfectly honorable to persons in private
life. Nothing is commoner than to hear people discriminate between their different
selves of this sort: “As a man I pity you, but as an official I must show you no mercy;
as a politician I regard him as an ally, but as a moralist I loathe him;” etc., etc. What
may be called ‘club-opinion’ is one of the very strongest forces in life.[3] The thief
must not steal from other thieves; the gambler must pay his gambling-debts, though he
pay no other debts in the world. The code of honor of fashionable society has
throughout history been full of permissions as well as of vetoes, the only reason for
following either of which is that so we best serve one of [p. 296] our social selves.
You must not lie in general, but you may lie as much as you please if asked about
your relations with a lady; you must accept a challenge from an equal, but if
challenged by an inferior you may laugh him to scorn: these are examples of what is
meant.
(c) By the Spiritual Self, so far as it belongs to the Empirical Me, I mean a man’s inner
or subjective being, his psychic faculties or dispositions, taken concretely; not the bare
principle of personal Unity, or ‘pure’ Ego, which remains still to be discussed. These
psychic dispositions are the most enduring and intimate part of the self, that which we
most verily seem to be. We take a purer self-satisfaction when we think of our ability
to argue and discriminate, of our moral sensibility and conscience, of our indomitable
will, than when we survey any of our other possessions. Only when these are altered
is a man said to be alienatus a se.
Now this spiritual self may be considered in various ways. We may divide it into
faculties, as just instanced, isolating them one from another, and identifying ourselves
with either in turn. This is an abstract way of dealing with consciousness, in which, as
it actually presents itself, a plurality of such faculties are always to be simultaneously
found; or we may insist on a concrete view, and then the spiritual self in us will be
either the entire stream of our personal consciousness, or the present ‘segment’ or
‘section’ of that stream, according as we take a broader or a narrower view – both the
stream and the section being concrete existences in time, and each being a unity after
its own peculiar kind. But whether we take it abstractly or concretely, our considering
the spiritual self at all is a reflective process, is the result of our abandoning the
outward-looking point of view, and of our having become able to think of subjectivity
as such, to think ourselves as thinkers.
This attention to thought as such, and the identification of ourselves with it rather than
with any of the objects which it reveals, is a momentous and in some respects a rather
mysterious operation, of which we need here only say that as a matter of fact it exists;
and that in everyone, at an early age, the distinction between thought as such, [p. 297]
and what it is ‘of’ or ‘about,’ has become familiar to the mind. The deeper grounds for
this discrimination may possibly be hard to find; but superficial grounds are plenty
and near at hand. Almost anyone will tell us that thought is a different sort of
existence from things, because many sorts of thought are of no things – e.g., pleasures,
pains, and emotions; others are of non-existent things – errors and fictions; others
again of existent things, but in a form that is symbolic and does not resemble them abstract ideas and concepts; whilst in the thoughts that do resemble the things they are
‘of’ (percepts, sensations), we can feel, alongside of the thing known, the thought of it
going on as an altogether separate act and operation in the mind.
Now this subjective life of ours, distinguished as such so clearly from the objects
known by its means, may, as aforesaid, be taken by us in a concrete or in an abstract
way. Of the concrete way I will say nothing just now, except that the actual ‘section’
of the stream will ere long, in our discussion of the nature of the principle of unity in
consciousness, play a very important part. The abstract way claims our attention first.
If the stream as a whole is identified with the Self far more than any outward thing,
a certain portion of the stream abstracted from the rest is so identified in an altogether
peculiar degree, and is felt by all men as a sort of innermost centre within the circle,
of sanctuary within the citadel, constituted by the subjective life as a whole.
Compared with this element of the stream, the other parts, even of the subjective life,
seem transient external possessions, of which each in turn can be disowned, whilst
that which disowns them remains. Now, what is this self of all the other selves?
Probably all men would describe it in much the same way up to a certain point. They
would call it the active element in all consciousness; saying that whatever qualities a
man’s feelings may possess, or whatever content his thought may include, there is a
spiritual something in him which seems to go out to meet these qualities and contents,
whilst they seem to come in to be received by it. It is what welcomes or rejects. It
presides over the perception of sensations, and by giving or withholding its
[p. 298] assent it influences the movements they tend to arouse. It is the home of
interest, – not the pleasant or the painful, not even pleasure or pain, as such, but that
within us to which pleasure and pain, the pleasant and the painful, speak. It is the
source of effort and attention, and the place from which appear to emanate the fiats of
the will. A physiologist who should reflect upon it in his own person could hardly
help, I should think, connecting it more or less vaguely with the process by which
ideas or incoming sensations are ‘reflected’ or pass over into outward acts. Not
necessarily that it should be this process or the mere feeling of this process, but that it
should be in some close way related to this process; for it plays a part analogous to it
in the psychic life, being a sort of junction at which sensory ideas terminate and from
which motor ideas proceed, and forming a kind of link between the two. Being more
incessantly there than any other single element of the mental life, the other elements
end by seeming to accrete round it and to belong to it. It becomes opposed to them as
the permanent is opposed to the changing and inconstant.
One may, I think, without fear of being upset by any future Galtonian circulars,
believe that all men must single out from the rest of what they call themselves some
central principle of which each would recognize the foregoing to be a fair general
description, – accurate enough, at any rate, to denote what is meant, and keep it
unconfused with other …
Purchase answer to see full
attachment