IB Philosophy SL Unit 2

Sufficient Condition

A characteristic that is enough to make something belong to a category

Necessary Condition

A characteristic that is absolutely required for something to belong to a certain category

Mutually Exclusive

Cannot be both necessary and sufficient

Wakefulness

Wakefulness, in a human sense, is the opposite of being asleep. For many living beings, however, it is simply a state of awareness of the world.

Awareness

Awareness is an elusive concept and can be found in many degrees. When we talk about human beings, awareness tends to include self-awareness, which would exclude many animals whose self-awareness is either non-existent or nonevident to us. Some people take an even more elevated view of awareness with a more spiritual approach to the term, seeing it as a rare quality that is only fully accessed through meditation or similar practices

Responsive

This characteristic is perhaps the most inclusive of all, because it doesn’t even seem to require a mind. After all, if animals were unable to respond to their environment, they would quickly become extinct. The very denition of “animal” – “a living organism which feeds on organic matter, typically having specialized sense organs and nervous system and able to respond rapidly to stimuli”8 – includes responsiveness.

Basic consciousness

wakefulness, awareness, and responsive —> shared by most human beings and sentient beings

Ethically

All human beings are persons and only human beings can be persons

Logically

Most human beings are persons and some other beings are persons.

Personal Response

Beliefs and values will inform what answer you tend to go with. For instance, if you are a religious believer, you may think that God clearly set human beings apart from the rest of creation, and you may not have a problem with the claim that human beings are all persons while other beings cannot be persons.

Agency

Refers to the ability people have to act and, by extension, to cause their own actions in a voluntary and intentional way.

Authenticity

Existentialists believe that human beings are essentially free, to the extent that they are able to determine the meaning of their life and decide who they want to be and what kind of existence they want to lead. Those who accept this absolute freedom and the huge responsibility that accompanies it live with authenticity

Bad faith/facticity

those who try to deny or hide from their own freedom live

Project

People need to focus on something they want, a main concern or a project for their life, and they need to do what needs to be done to achieve it, throwing themselves into the life they have chosen, with feeling, passion, and intensity. The way we live our life is more important than what we do with it.

Anthropocentrism

The theory that humans are of central importance to the universe

Utilitarianism

An ethical theory that equates goodness with the maximization of pleasure for the greatest number of people

Preference Utilitarianism

Emphasizes the satisfaction of preferences; goodness is not simple pleasure, but is the possibility of choosing things and having one’s interests fullled. These interests are not narrowly dened, however, and one of the key components for the state of having interests is sentience, the capacity to feel, which played such a strong role in Bentham’s assessment of animals.