Analysis Of "The Coddling Of The American Mind" Through Ethics

While many of the college campuses over the last few years has been turning out badly, students and teachers say they are scare to talk openly. Rates of students facing the problems like nervousness sorrow and suicide are rising all over in country. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt indicate how the new issues on campus have their sources in three terrible thoughts. which are:

• what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker
• always trust your feelings
• life is a battle between good people and evil people.

These three great untruths disclaim basic psychological principles about success and old knowledge from many cultures. Embracing these untruths and the subsequent culture of safetyism interferes with youngsters social passionate and academic progression. It makes it harder for them to wind up independent grown-ups who can explore the irregular street of life.

After reading the article “The Coddling of the American Mind” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in The Atlantic, I have analyzed this article from the point of view of Aristotle’s Eudaimonism, Kant’s Deontology and Mill’s Utilitarianism as follows:

Aristotle: Eudaimonism

The article describes a situation among university students that is hard to reconcile with Aristotle’s ethical theory in that emotions are being used as an ethical standard rather that rationality. Aristotle moreover advances an objective understanding of virtue that does not square with the proposed ethical authority of the varying subjective outlooks that inform the shared desire of coddled collegiate minds to inhibit any speech any one of them may find offensive (relativism).

Immanuel Kant: Deontology

It seems possible to align Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative with the objection of the college students mentioned in the article in that the principle of not giving offense to anyone is what they seem to say everyone should base their actions on. However, given reason’s place as the source of value in Kant’s system, it could be argued that offending others is not only compatible with but essential to the ethical life in that those with irrational prejudices will certainly be offended by actions that agree with right reason.

John Stuart Mill: Utilitarianism

Focusing on all the student’s demand of protection from arguments they find challenging and the professors and administrators who cave in to them and voicing complaints against microaggressions and insisting on trigger warnings in the context of higher learning seems to be based on the utilitarian principle that these measures will guarantee the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people in the university environment. However, the article’s authors’ mention of the faculty harmed by students’ oversensitivity, in addition to the harm these same students impose on themselves through their reluctance to face their own fears, suggests that their ethical outlook is not utilitarian at all.