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

In order to answer this question, I feel that we need to understand what it means to be a good person versus being a person who performs good acts. Being a good person means that you do, say, and believe in doing things for others simply because you feel it is the right thing to do. Being a person who does good acts just makes you someone who does good things. You could be doing those things for an alternative motive. For example, a student may bring his teacher an apple to class everyday; but that student is hoping that because of his good act, his teacher will reward him with an A at the end of the semester. In my opinion, under this definition, being a good person is way more important that being a person who performs good acts.

When analyzing this question, we need to also take into account, virtue ethics versus action ethics. Virtue focuses more on what we should be whereas ethics on what we should do. In this situation, the virtue is the good person whereas the action is the person who performs good acts. In my opinion, the good person who genuinely cares will be of more importance than the person who just performs these good acts.

3. Does the process by which decisions are made matter more than the outcomes of these decisions (procedural justice vs. distributive justice)?

When making any decision in life, people need to weigh out the pros versus the cons; also known as distributive justice. They base a decision on which outweighs the other. If a decision is expected to result in something beneficial, than that person will have taken steps that lead them to believe this. The actual result is irrelevant. As long as the process in which the decision was made was done in the best way possible, the outcome cannot be guaranteed. What I mean by this is nothing in life is one hundred percent guaranteed. If an NFL team wins all 16 regular season games and has a 99.99% chance of winning the Super Bowl, a chance of failure still exists. If someone was going to place a bet on that team winning the Super Bowl and they end up losing, they know that the steps they took to take that chance and to make that decision were more than logical.

6. Is my own life worth more than the lives of others, the same, or less (selfishness vs. altruism)?

When answering this question I feel that it is very biased based on how you were raised. In my opinion, my life is worth no more or less than anybody else’s. Growing up in my home, helping others was very important. I always had to help my little sister with homework, my mom to bring in the food packages every week, and my dad to shovel the snow as well as other physical labor. Being raised in this manner, I have grown to try to help others as a second nature. When I help others I feel good about myself. It is for this reason that I feel my life is worth the same as everyone else.

Selfish people do not like to help others. They do what is best for themselves and only themselves. They usually feel a sense of entitlement and do not care about the opinions of others. For this reason, they feel that their life is of more worth than somebody else. Someone who is altruistic or selfless is much more likely to help somebody else and to feel that they are of the same worth.