“Existentialism”
“existentialism” as our final topic. Existentialism is under a branch of philsophy known as ethics which is primarily concerned with making choices in life so that the right choices will result in the greatest amount of happiness and goodness for our lives. Where things get tricky is that depending on “who you are and how you’re made”, this somewhat determines our actions. We can illustrate this using common things in nature. For instance, if you’re born as a rabbit you’ll be eating a lot of veggies and if you’re a lion, you’ll be eating lots of meat. In addition, how we’re born not only determines our daily choices but also our life goals and purpose in general. To illustrate this point, let’s take the jobs of two different animals, bees and dogs. A bee’s job is to pollinate 75 to 80 percent of all fruits and vegetables we consume. A German Sheperd is one of the best breed as police dogs. Now, imagine if we tried to switch the jobs of bees and dogs, how crazy and inefficient would life be? Dogs would be going around sniffing flowers and we would be using bees to fight crime! (Animals were only used here only to illustrate a point since obviously we are not animals but hopefully you get the picture). Therefore, existentialism tries to deal the ultimate questions: “What is the purpose or meaning behind life? Whose idea was it for us to be here and how are we supposed to live?” We know that to be happy and succesful we have to find our own special purpose that is different from others since everyone is unique (e.g., “run your own race, live your own life and not someone else’s hopes and dreams). However, this quest is not as easy as it seems. The theories below are some common competing theories in ethics that rival existentialism and so please view the summaries and follow the steps.
