Suicide - Ethical Issues

My Guess?

•    Since Utilitarianism states that happiness is not only important for an individual, but society too and since suicide is a negative event which affects and harms not only individual, but people around the individual, suicide is not considered to be appropriate and right to commit. 

•    Deontological: Suicide is morally wrong, since it breaks the moral rules

•    They both prohibit it

Deontological: 

•    Suicide violates one of our most fundamental moral rules "Do not kill". Since suicide is killing and killing is wrong, suicide is wrong as well even without the reference to the consequences of it.

•    Leaving the world of moral arguments that have no consideration to circumstances or consequences 

Utilitarian: 

•    According to utilitarianism, the "goodness" of an action is judged by its impact not only on the individual, but also upon others. Research has demonstrated that suicide has harmful emotional, interpersonal, and economic effects upon individuals and society. 

•    According to the utilitarian view, it is wrong to commit a suicide if it will destroy not only that life which is a benefit to oneself , but it will cause other persons anguish, sorrow and other emotional, social and financial  disbenefits due to deprivation and loss. 

•    In some rare cases, suicide of one destructive and burdensome individual will constitute a benefit to others. 

John Stuart Mill states that suicide, like slavery, doesn't bring about a greater range of freedom, therefore shouldn't be allowed 

Repressed memory

Elizabeth Loftus, psychological scientist and expert on human memory, discussed how memory is not necessarily reliable since it can be changed or implanted. (Military study, stimulation of being under stress as being capture by an enemy . She used an example of Steven Tidas, a man who was falsely accused of rape by a woman. It is interesting how the woman firstly said that he looks similar to the rapist, later in the trial completely accused Tidas of the rape. Lotus also commented on studies that she carried out where she implanted certain events, for example as a child you got attacked by an animal or started drowning and were saved by a safeguard. These events don't necessarily look as if they cause any fear or tension, but she noted that people still started to think that it actually happened to them. She also talked about a study where they showed a picture of a car that has been hit or smashed to participants. When asked what speed the car was going to when hit most of the participants identified the speed as being slower than the car was smashed. Also when asked to identify the environment around the car, participants commented on a glass around the car, when there was no smashed glass there. Also in another picture where there was a car and a stop sign, when recalling a memory they said that it was a yield sign. 

Loftus also asked if implanting false memories should be banned or discouraged. Which apparently caused a lot of hate on Elizabeth Loftus. She then said that parents should use this false memory implanting to, for example, help their obese child by telling them that as children they didn't like to eat certain food (there was a study about it where participants were told they didn't like eggs and on a picnic they didn't even eat it). 

Imagination, hipnosis - could influence what people think happened and what they recall. 

Americans - child labor 

Girl that accused her mother of assault.

Definitions of Intelligence

The ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use knowledge to adapt to new experiences

A mental quality that consists of the abilities to learn from experience, adapt to new situations, understand and handle abstract concepts, and use knowledge to manipulate one’s environment

The ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills

The ability to learn or understand things or to deal with new or difficult situations

The capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity

First of all, it's very hard to measure out intelligence because it involves a lot of different factors such as ones culture, emotions, age, skill sets, thoughts and etc. Because of these factors and the way they influence our intelligence it's hard to define it and that's why we have so many definitions of intelligence. Most of them can be easily manipulated, therefore making them controversial. The four definitions that I have chosen are to some extent different, but similar and can be interpreted differently. The first, second and fourth definitions, all have emotions involved in them since they include experiences, new situations or environments. It's easier to adapt these two definitions to social situations than for example the third definition, since it doesn't involve emotions, similarly to the last definition. Even those the last and third definitions, both seem to have only knowledge and skills involved,  all five of these definitions have something in common, which is the ability to learn new things. 

In the video above, two theories and definitions of intelligence (Spearman's and Gardner's) are discussed and compared. This video also looks into the controversy of definitions of intelligence and ranking intelligence as well as dividing intelligence into different types of intelligence. 

Emotions and Intelligence

Knowledge Question: To what extent are emotions part of intelligence?

Definition against:

“The ability to use memory, knowledge, experience, understanding and judgement in order to solve problems ” AllWords Dictionary, 2006

Definition for:

“the general mental ability involved in calculating, reasoning, perceiving relationships and analogies, learning quickly, storing and retrieving information, using language fluently, classifying, generalising  and adjusting to new situations.” Columbia Encyclopedia, sixth edition, 2006 

“Sensory capacity, capacity for perceptual recognition, quickness, range or flexibility or association, facility and imagination, span of attention, quickness or alertness in response.” F. N. Freeman 

First of all as we can see in the definitions above, emotions aren't always involved and that makes me question why? Well, since a lot of psychologists and scientist usually disagree on whether emotion is involved or not caused these different definitions that in some way are similar. In my opinion, emotions should be considered to be a part of intelligence. It is intelligence because when people are born, they are born with skills such as ability to reason and children from an early age have an ability to detect emotions around them (for example Mayer stated that babies know when their parents are angry at them). Also people usually make decisions based on their emotions. 

Most of the time emotions are not considered to be a part of intelligence because it's hard measure EI. However Dr. Salovey, Dr. David Caruso and John. D. Mayer developed a new set of 12 ability tasks that assess this four-branch model. These ability tasks include asking people to identify emotions in faces as well as asking people to identify a set of simple emotions which, when combined, match a more complex feeling. The research with these new scales showed that emotional intelligence can be measured reliably, exists as a unitary ability, and is related to, but independent of, standard intelligence

Mayer et al also have concluded from his research that emotional intelligence does indeed meet these traditional criteria of a standard intelligence, such as breaking it out in several sets of mental abilities, is intercorrelated, abilities have a positive correlation to traditional intelligence

Even though these are only few claims that show that emotional intelligence is intelligence and there were a lot of counterclaims against it , I still think that emotions play an important role in intelligence. Without emotions people wouldn't know how to perceive relationships with other people or how to adjust to new situations, which are both very important aspects in the definition of intelligence since they are, repeated a lot of times in different definitions.

In-group Bias

Ingroup bias is simply the tendency to favor one's own group. In-group bias is influenced by a neurotransmitter called oxytocin also known as "love molecule. It helps us to create strong bonds and relationships with people in our in-group and also makes us fearful, suspicious and disdainful to others groups known as the out-groups. 

The in-group bias causes us to overestimate the abilities and value of our immediate group. 

A study that supports this : British schoolboys were randomly placed into two groups. The boys were led to believe that the groups were defined on the basis of a preference for paintings by Klee or Kandinsky. The boys had to work individually (while knowing they belonged to either a Klee or Kandinsky group) and had to award points to both in-group and out-group members. They were not allowed to give points to themselves.

Results: The boys showed a strong tendency to award more points to members of their in-group over members of the out-group. Sometimes the boys would sacrifice gain for their in-group in order to maximize the difference between their in-group and out-group. For example, the boys would often give an in-group member 7 points and an out-group member 1, rather than giving them both 13 points as they could have done.