Fluent Essays

8 pages essa. All Instructions and formatting should be followed. This is Current Moral and Social Issues. So, topic you will choose must be related to those. I also attached the class reading. As pointed in the Instructions, at least one philosophical perspective from the class. Check the images in order for the InstructionsWhat Does it All Mean? A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy Thomas Nagel 1982, Oxford University Press; selected chapters; selections made and produced in this format, by Trip McCrossin, solely for pedagogical purposes. Ch. 7 — Right and Wrong Ch. 8 — Justice Chapter 7 — Right and Wrong Suppose you work in a library, checking people’s books as they leave, and a friend asks you to let him smuggle out a hard-to-find reference work that he wants to own. You might hesitate to agree for various reasons. You might be afraid that he’ll be caught, and that both you and he will then get into trouble. You might want the book to stay in the library so that you can consult it yourself. But you may also think that what he proposes is wrong — that he shouldn’t do it and you shouldn’t help him. If you think that, what does it mean, and what, if anything, makes it true? To say it’s wrong is not just to say it’s against the rules. There can be bad rules which prohibit what isn’t wrong — like laws against criticizing the government. A rule can also be bad because it requires something that is wrong — like a law that requires racial segregation in hotels and restaurants. The ideas of wrong and right are different from the ideas of what is and is not against he rules. Otherwise they couldn’t be used in the evaluation of rules as well as of actions. If you think it would be wrong to help your friend steal the book, then you will feel uncomfortable about doing it: in some way you won’t want to do it, even if you are also reluctant to refuse help to a friend. Where does the desire not to do it come from; what is its motive, the reason behind it? There are various ways in which something can be wrong, but in this case, if you had to explain it, you’d probably say that it would be unfair to other users of the library who may be just as interested in the book as your 2 / Nagel / What Does It All Mean? / chapters 7-8 / solely for pedagogical purposes   friend is, but who consult it in the reference room, where anyone who needs it can find it. You may also feel that to let him take it would betray your employers, who are paying you precisely to keep this sort of thing from happening. These thoughts have to do with effects on others — not necessarily effects on their feelings, since they may never find out about it, but some kind of damage nevertheless. In general, the thought that something is wrong depends on its impact not just on the person who does it but on other people. They wouldn’t like it, and they’d object if they found out. But suppose you try to explain all this to your friend, and he says, “I know the head librarian wouldn’t like it if he found out, and probably some of the other users of the library would be unhappy to find the book gone, but who cares? I want the book; why should I care about them?” The argument that it would be wrong is supposed to give him a reason not to do it. But if Selected Materials: Privacy Produced in this format, by Trip McCrossin, solely for personal and pedagogical purposes, and not for distribution; † indicates on-line resource 1. 1975, Thomson, “The Right to Privacy” 2. 1975, Scanlon, “Thomson on Privacy” The Right to Privacy Judith Jarvis Thomson Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1975, Vol. 4, No. 4* 1. Perhaps the most striking thing about the right to privacy is that nobody seems to have any very clear idea what it is. Consider, for example, the familiar proposal that the right to privacy is the right “to be let alone.” On the one hand, this doesn’t seem to take in enough. The police might say, “We grant we used a special X-ray device on Smith, so as to be able to watch him through the walls of his house; we grant we trained an amplifying device on him so as to be able to hear everything he said; but we let him strictly alone: we didn’t touch him, we didn’t even go near him — our devices operate at a distance.” Anyone who believes there is a right to privacy would presumably believe that it has been violated in Smith’s case; yet he would be hard put to explain precisely how, if the right to privacy is the right to be let alone. And on the other hand, this account of the right to privacy lets in far too much. If I hit Jones on the head with a brick I have not let him alone. Yet, while hitting Jones on the head with a brick is surely violating some right of Jones’, doing it should surely not turn out to violate his right to privacy. Else, where is this to end? Is every violation of a right a violation of the right to privacy? It seems best to be less ambitious, to begin with at least. I suggest, then, that we look at some specific, imaginary cases in which people would say, “There, in that case, the right to privacy has been violated,” and ask ourselves precisely why this would be said, and what, if anything, would justify saying it. 2. But there is a difficulty to be taken note of first. What I have in mind is that there may not be so much agreement on the cases as I implied. Suppose that my husband and I are having a fight, shouting at each other as loud as we can; and suppose that we have not thought to close the windows, so that we can easily be heard from the street outside. It seems to me that anyone who stops to listen violates no right of ours; stopping to listen is at worst bad, Not Nice, not done by the best people. But now suppose, by contrast, that we are having a quiet fight, behind closed windows, and cannot be heard by the normal person who passes by; and suppose that someone across the street trains an amplifier on our house, by means of which he can hear what we say; and suppose that he does this in order to hear what we say. It seems to me that anyone who does this does violate a right of ours, the right to privacy, I should have thought. But there is room for disagreement. It might be said that in neither case is the