Good Morning

I know it's a bit late to be posting my response to today's ethical query (the ridiculous hour of 5:25 am), but better late than never, or not at all.

"In a situation where one person is being harmed and the other is doing the harming which is most to be avoided, harming the other or being harmed by another?" '
-I personally feel that one should avoid harming another person as much as humanly possible (humanly possible what an interesting phrase) but the plain and simple fact is that you can't never hurt anyone. Have you ever heard the old saying, you always hurt the one's you love. It's true, it seems, that the people you care about the most are the ones you can't seem to avoid hurting. Let's remember the example given in class, about the three friends, one is a girl in a relationship and the other two are her friends who know or at least have reason to suspect that her boyfriend is cheating on her, but those two friends disagree about how to handle the situation-should they tell her or not. They both care about her, and neither one of them wants her to get hurt, but is it really any of their business? It's a difficult descision, and she's probably going to get hurt either way, so wouldn't telling her be the lesser of two evils (another fun phrase)? I've found that in this type of situation (and others that are less touchy) it is in everyones' best interest, theirs and your own, to just be brutally honest. But to deliberately hurt another person out of malice is something else entirely. Someone who is able to deliberately hurt another person and feels no guilt has, or is bordering on, sociopathic behavior (or anti-social personality disorder if you really want to get technical). Here's something else to chew on: where do you draw the line between rational moral judgement and mental illnesses that impair the distinctions between right and wrong?
To avoid being hurt by another is within anyone's best interest. One shouldn't allow another to hurt them, for reasons of self-preservation (it doesn't always have to be life or death, but the preservation of one's sense of self-worth. Basically, don't allow yourself to be bullied, my reasoning stemming from my experience as a seasoned doormat, don't let anyone walk all over you, it's not good for you or for those doing the tredding. I know that this reasoning isn't very solid, so I suppose that I could refer you back to the example I used in my first post, of the killer and the killed, an extreme example, but it gets the point across.

Quote: '"Rational self-interest is ones highest moral obligation."' Ayn Rand. A good point that should be examined further, but probably not now. All in good time.

"What skills should we work to possess, the skills to persuade others to agree with our beliefs or the skills to discern whether the beliefs we have are true or false?" Admittedly I'm writing this portion of my post after the class discussion. When my group and I had started our discussion we did not notice the typo in the syllabus, where the r in our was a t, and what a difference one little letter made. So it was 'the skills to persuade others to agree with our beliefs' opposed to "the skills to persuade others to agree with out beliefs.'
I would think that the skill to discern whether or not the beliefs we have are true would certainly be a more worthwhile goal than to simply possess the skills to be persuasive. Persuasion seems useless unless you have the ideas to back it up, though there are great many persuasive people who can spin a convincing web of bullshit (which is unfortunate for those of us who don't possess the talent for bs, but at least whatever we accomplish with the skills that we have we have come by honestly). I think maybe there is some distinction between persuasion and manipulation, you can be persuasive without trying to be manipulative, which is why I don't agree that we can't work to aquire the both the skills of persuasion and the ability to discern or evaluate our beliefs. There's nothing wrong with being able to articulate your beliefs in a convincing manner, but it should be complimented by the ability to step back and evaluate those beliefs.

"What do (a) and (b) have in common?"
I suppose being able to persuade others to our beliefs without having first considered the validity of our beliefs would fall under the category of harming another. But only having the skills to discern whether or not our beliefs are right or wrong without also have the ability to be persuasive (which would provide us with the ability to defend our beliefs) would leave us susceptible to others' beliefs and convictions. We can believe in something all we want, but if we can't defend our beliefs and ourselves then we are vulnerable and others could try and take advantage of that.