Environmental Ethics:
Reflection:
Sense of Place Draft 1:
Sense of Place Draft 2:
Happiness and Meaning:
Essential Questions:
- What is the purpose of your existence?
- What is happiness and what makes you happy?
- What does it mean to live a meaningful life?
- To what extent can literature shape your personal philosophy on happiness and meaning?
Visual Piece:
Reflection:
Throughout this project I learned a lot about what makes me happy and what gives my life meaning. Yet the most important thing that I learned about myself was that in order for my life to have meaning, I need to be happy. When we first started talking about happiness and meaning in class, most people said that a meaningful life was more important than a happy life because happiness is a very temporary thing and we only get short glimpses of it. Although, I disagree. While I have had my ups and downs, I feel as though I have been truly happy for most of my life, not just for short glimpses. I believe that one can live a truly happy life if they choose to enjoy the little things and find good in all situations. We live a very short life so why not choose to be happy? Through this project, I realized that mountain biking and racing has brought me the most joy in life possible and because of that, I feel like my life means something. Being outside and doing what I love to do with the people I love has made me a very positive person. And doesn’t the world need more happy, positive people?
After Project Questions:
After Project Questions:
- How does me trying to live the happiest life possible affect others?
- When I am older, will the amount of money I make affect my happiness?
- What does racing really mean to me and what would happen if I had to stop?
- How can I show people that living the happiest life is a meaningful life?
Personal Philosophy:
The Morality and Politics of Justice:
Project Reflection:
To start off the Morality and Politics of Justice Project, we first learned about Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr. and what they stood for. From here, we were presented the topic of justice and how security, liberty, and equality need to be balanced in order to achieve justice. We then studied the four main moral and political philosophies, utilitarianism, libertarianism, deontology, and John Rawls Justice as Fairness Principle, and broke down each philosophy to understand the belief system for each. Utilitarianism is when you should act in a way out of utility or to benefit the greater good of the community, libertarianism is giving the individual freedom to do as he or she please with little to no interference, deontology is based around making decisions based on duty and not for person benefit, and the John Rawls Justice as Fairness principle is based on making decisions as if we were all equal. After this, we began looking at current events to try to understand the most just coarse of action for solving the issue while also maintaining security, liberty, and equality. Lastly, we started the actual project. For this project, we were asked to pick a current political issue that was interesting to us and write and Op-Ed explaining what we thought the most just coarse of action for solving it was. To accompany the Op-Ed at exhibition, we created art pieces using rhetoric to help persuade the audience that our reason was the most just.
Rhetoric/Argumentation:
In the first draft of my Op-Ed, the way that I worded some of my sentences in my hook made it sound like I was actually arguing against my topic:
Imagine you are terminally ill, you have mere months left to live and there is no possible way to save you from passing away. With each passing day, your suffering is getting worse along with your quality of life. You are given the option to be put on heavy, debilitating medications in a partial state of comatose, or voluntarily ingest lethal medication to end your suffering without drawing out your death. What would you choose?
In the final draft of my Op-Ed, I reworded the some of the sentences and removed the question at the end to prevent the reader from initially getting confused about what my perspective was:
...You are given the choice between being put on heavy, debilitating medications that will induce a partial state of comatose while also drawing out your death further diminishing your quality of life, or voluntarily ingesting lethal medication to end your suffering with peace of mind in knowing it will be over. By choosing to take a lethal prescription, you are choosing to take control over your own body and condition as you near your final days.
Sentence Craft:
Initially when I wrote my Op-Ed, I knew what evidence I wanted to use yet I wasn't exactly sure how to fit it all together. Because of this, it resulted in unorganized sentences that didn't make sense:
In states California, Vermont, Washington, and Oregon this law is mandated by the state and in Montana and New Mexico, it is mandated by a court ruling.
I rewrote this in my final draft so that I could still use this piece of evidence as a crucial point in my paper:
In states California, Vermont, Washington, and Oregon this law is mandated by the state, in Montana and New Mexico, it is mandated by a court ruling. Currently in Colorado, state lawmakers are attempting again to pass death with dignity as an end-of-life option.
Moral and Political Philosophy Content:
When I wrote my first draft, I was unable to find a quote supporting the moral philosophy that related to my topic so I simply didn't include one.
In the last draft of my Op-Ed, I was able to find a supporting quote that I needed to support a moral philosophy:
As University College London political philosopher Gerald Cohen states, “each person enjoys, over himself and his powers, full and exclusive rights of control and use, and therefore owes no service or product to anyone else that he has not contracted to supply”. Every person has the right to make decisions for themselves and shouldn’t have them taken away as they are on their deathbed.
My art was created to represent the feeling that a patient has when they are denied the choice to use death-with-dignity. I chose to make it look like a sick patient is attached to an IV and other tubes while in a prison cell. The patient is faceless and prison cell bars stick out from the piece creating a cage around the patient to show that they are in fact a prisoner to their sickness to other people if they are not given the liberty to decide what happens to their body's. The fact that the patient is faceless represents the pathos is the piece because it is showing that the patient doesn't have a say in what happens them. The quote in the window and represent logos because I explain who the person is making the quote and how she was involved with death-with-dignity.
Before this project, I struggled with writing about topics that I had experience with for school assignments because I wasn't sure how to balance the emotional side with evidence and have it be convincing. Yet through this project, I was able to take a topic that I did have experience with and pair it with strong evidence to create a persuasive Op-Ed. At first, it was hard for me to incorporate the evidence that I had gathered on death-with-dignity because it was a topic that hit so close to home that I kind of didn't want to include other evidence and I just wanted to write about how I felt. Yet as I found more and more evidence that shared the exact same beliefs as mine, it became easier to form thoughts about how I was going to write my paper but leave out my own story.
Rhetoric/Argumentation:
In the first draft of my Op-Ed, the way that I worded some of my sentences in my hook made it sound like I was actually arguing against my topic:
Imagine you are terminally ill, you have mere months left to live and there is no possible way to save you from passing away. With each passing day, your suffering is getting worse along with your quality of life. You are given the option to be put on heavy, debilitating medications in a partial state of comatose, or voluntarily ingest lethal medication to end your suffering without drawing out your death. What would you choose?
In the final draft of my Op-Ed, I reworded the some of the sentences and removed the question at the end to prevent the reader from initially getting confused about what my perspective was:
...You are given the choice between being put on heavy, debilitating medications that will induce a partial state of comatose while also drawing out your death further diminishing your quality of life, or voluntarily ingesting lethal medication to end your suffering with peace of mind in knowing it will be over. By choosing to take a lethal prescription, you are choosing to take control over your own body and condition as you near your final days.
Sentence Craft:
Initially when I wrote my Op-Ed, I knew what evidence I wanted to use yet I wasn't exactly sure how to fit it all together. Because of this, it resulted in unorganized sentences that didn't make sense:
In states California, Vermont, Washington, and Oregon this law is mandated by the state and in Montana and New Mexico, it is mandated by a court ruling.
I rewrote this in my final draft so that I could still use this piece of evidence as a crucial point in my paper:
In states California, Vermont, Washington, and Oregon this law is mandated by the state, in Montana and New Mexico, it is mandated by a court ruling. Currently in Colorado, state lawmakers are attempting again to pass death with dignity as an end-of-life option.
Moral and Political Philosophy Content:
When I wrote my first draft, I was unable to find a quote supporting the moral philosophy that related to my topic so I simply didn't include one.
In the last draft of my Op-Ed, I was able to find a supporting quote that I needed to support a moral philosophy:
As University College London political philosopher Gerald Cohen states, “each person enjoys, over himself and his powers, full and exclusive rights of control and use, and therefore owes no service or product to anyone else that he has not contracted to supply”. Every person has the right to make decisions for themselves and shouldn’t have them taken away as they are on their deathbed.
My art was created to represent the feeling that a patient has when they are denied the choice to use death-with-dignity. I chose to make it look like a sick patient is attached to an IV and other tubes while in a prison cell. The patient is faceless and prison cell bars stick out from the piece creating a cage around the patient to show that they are in fact a prisoner to their sickness to other people if they are not given the liberty to decide what happens to their body's. The fact that the patient is faceless represents the pathos is the piece because it is showing that the patient doesn't have a say in what happens them. The quote in the window and represent logos because I explain who the person is making the quote and how she was involved with death-with-dignity.
Before this project, I struggled with writing about topics that I had experience with for school assignments because I wasn't sure how to balance the emotional side with evidence and have it be convincing. Yet through this project, I was able to take a topic that I did have experience with and pair it with strong evidence to create a persuasive Op-Ed. At first, it was hard for me to incorporate the evidence that I had gathered on death-with-dignity because it was a topic that hit so close to home that I kind of didn't want to include other evidence and I just wanted to write about how I felt. Yet as I found more and more evidence that shared the exact same beliefs as mine, it became easier to form thoughts about how I was going to write my paper but leave out my own story.