1.  Is it more important to be a good person or to perform good acts? (virtue ethics vs action ethics)

I believe that it is much more important to perform good acts than to be a good person.  Everyone has their own limits and abilities however our job is to try and perform good acts within our capabilities.  For example, if you know that there are people in your city going hungry you can support there being a soup kitchen nearby for the people to go to, which is an example of being a good person since you want those people to have help.  Turning it into a good act would be volunteering at the soup kitchen, so that you are being a part of the action of giving food to those in need of it.  If, for example, you were under critical care and were not able to walk, then perhaps your ability to help the soup kitchen falls under the umbrella of perhaps donating money instead of physically helping out.  It all falls under what your capability is.

2.  Do the ends justify the means? (if a goal is morally important enough any method of achieving it is acceptable)

As talked about in the beginning of this module we all have intuition, which leads and helps us to decide what is ethically wrong or right, good or bad.  If we always believe that a specific goal is important enough that any achievement of it is acceptable then we put blinding parts of our intuition at risk.  A lot of the times it only takes one person to convince countless amounts of people to believe something is so morally right that any method of reaching the goal is acceptable. One of the biggest examples in history of the ends not justifying the means is World War 2.  One man came into power and convinced people that humans that were not of the aryan race were not meant to be alive and were known as vermin.  Just because these people thought that only people of the aryan race should be alive does not mean that killing the people that weren’t of that race was justified.  Just because something happens to be a shared moral does not give cause to stop at nothing to pursue that moral in the case of World War 2.

5.  Do the pleasure and pain of non-human animals matter as much as the pleasure and pain of humans?

Although I would like to say that the pleasure and pain of non-human animals matter as much as the pleasure and pain of humans, it is simply not true in the present day.  I realize that some people believe that becoming a vegetarian is working towards the equality between humans and non humans but it has barely even made a dent.  Anthropocentrism radiates through our every day life at such a high intensity.  We have non human animals as pets and locked up in zoos and many even still tested on.  We live in an extreme anthropocentric environment.  If you were to turn on the television and watch the news or even log onto a news website, the content is constantly about the effect everything, including the ecosystem has on people.  In a different time period, perhaps the prehistoric era it was much easier to have a very non speciesism view on environmental ethics however a lot of progress in human evolution has occurred.  We became discriminatory towards other species the more we developed as a species which caused us to be a speciesism based society.