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

I think the definition of a good vs. bad person differs from person to person. My view of a good/ bad person would be your internal thoughts and whether you do something because you really possess altruism. A person that thinks about how they want to kill animals, for example, would be considered a bad person to me. However, someone that has those thoughts could refrain themselves from doing that. I would still say they are a bad person because their intentions are bad. Someone else could say that since the person refrained from killing the animals they are actually a good person, but I would think they were bad because they have rotten thoughts. Someone with good thoughts could also decide to do something bad. I think it is important to be both a good person and perform good acts. This will make the world a better place. They must coexist, but if you had to pick one over the other, overall the most important ethic is whether you perform a good act or not. I hold this view because I believe that you can morally be a bad or good person, but if you perform bad acts then that’s where you will be causing damage to the world.

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

More pressure comes with procedural justice because the process directly influences how your outcome will be. An outcome is usually easy to conjure such as, “We need to stop climate change”, but you need to properly execute your process in order to get the right outcome. Someone might ask you the question “how are you going to reduce air pollution?” Any way you accomplish this goal will come from the process. If your process is not right you could also get the outcome you want, but you could create other problems. So, if I am going to ride the bus to reduce air pollution I need to make sure that the bus won’t be effecting the environment in some other way that is even worse than air pollution. Outcomes are just as important because you will spend a lot of time on creating these outcomes, so you want to have the right one. Also all outcomes will probably have an effect on something else whether it’s a gain or loss.

5: Do the pleasure and pain of non-human animals matter as much as the pleasure and pain of humans (speciesism)?

The pain and pleasure of non-human animals matters just as much as humans because of the fact that those sensations have the same impact on them as they do on us, as they are able to feel those emotions. If we think it doesn’t matter then that is simply our inability to put ourselves in their shoes. We can’t feel that pain or pleasure so as long as we feel okay it doesn’t really have an effect on us. Any creature badly harmed will ultimately want to survive. If a non-human animal saw me they would probably have the same thought in their head- “Oh that’s just a human.” Then, if they knew me they would realize that I would never want to experience pain. It’s all about imagining yourself as the other entity, and thinking about how they would really feel. We shouldn’t try to care about others, but instead we need to care about other human and non- human animals. If not, they will suffer at the hands of others who only care about themselves.