Ethics

Ethics is a very important topic that is very controversial in many places and situations, specially when it comes to cultures, religions and tastes.

Many cultures accept many things that for other cultures it may be wrong; for example, Mr. Tomalin explained a situation where once he was working in a place with very different cultural, religious and ethical points of view. Once he was passing besides a classroom and he saw a teacher hitting the students with a ruler. He was shocked by this situation, as for most of us this is an unethical situation. On the other hand, he later found out that in the place he was it was not considered bad hitting students.   Also, in religion for example the bible more or less gives examples for how believers should have ethical behaviours in very specific passages. 

When we were talking about ethics we saw a video about how cows were slaughtered for human consumption, and it gave different points of view, from vegans, vegetarians and meat lovers. It was a really shocking video, as it explicitly showed how cows were killed and it was a pretty violent way. In this way you can see how people can have different points of view about what is ethical and what is not, because vegetarians and vegans find the slaughtering and the eating of meat very unethical, even one of the vegetarians state that he considers it is "just like eating a human".

We live with ethics everyday, and it is a topic that can be very debatable, but there cannot be an universal truth or ethic, because we all think very different, and if we all think very similar, there might be some people who will not think the same as us. Even if we consider something to be a universal ethical truth, maybe a crazy person might think different.

Politics, directed by Gonzalo Serna

Gonzalo Serna has been my teacher since year 9, and since the first class I had with him I had a lot of fun, just because he talks about topics that are sometimes not very common or considered taboos. He has very controversial points of view and he is very honest in everything he says and thinks.

When he started explaining about Politics as a way of knowing, I already had an idea of what he was going to cover in his presentation; how we are condemned to live in a society where in order for us to be happy we have to be productive, or how our ideals make us have our "own little world", and I was not wrong, he covered these topics in his presentations.

He started by stating how politics where everywhere in our lives. Basically we all have very different opinions and ideals about things that surrounds us, this kind of isolates us from other people, I see it as if these ideals and perspectives were a bubble that surrounded us, and in order for us to live, we have to bump into other people's bubbles, or sometimes even share bubbles. We can either agree or disagree with other peoples' bubbles,  and that is where politics happen, when we have to share, express, agree or even disagree with some things.

The last topic discussed was about our role in society, and how society expects something from us, because when we are young we get education and goods, but society expects that when we grow up we provide the same for future generations.

Considered this, society has to make sure we will provide these goods to future generations, and for this, it makes us think that a person who doesn't provide these things for the future generations is a bad person, and it should be judged, but a person who does a great effort to provide them is a good person.