With my environmental philosophy class being right in the middle of our unit on climate change and global warming, with a lot of the focus on different possible solutions, I have begun to notice a lot of different connections between my environmental philosophy course and some of the different readings that we have gone through in this course over the semester. Today in class as discussed different ways to help prevent and alleviate climate change, the topic of educating people to be more empathetic and altruistic came up. The general idea was if society as a whole was taught to have more empathy for others and be overall more altruistic than maybe we could have more sympathy for our fellow and our planet in general. With this we might be able to turn back the clock on some of the damage we have already done and hopefully prevent more damage from occurring in the future. During this discussion I couldn’t help but think back to our discussions over Confucianism in the first half of the semester. Many of his teachings seemed to be focused on very similar concepts to what we discussed in my philosophy class. After class I revisited some of the Confucian readings and sure enough a lot of it fit together. For example one of my favorite quotes that I think embodies this says, “If you govern them by means of virtue and control them with propriety, they will gain their own sense of shame, and thus correct themselves.” I think that this fits very well with the discussion I had today in my philosophy class. If we were to govern and teach based more on virtue and propriety I certainly think they way we handle climate change and other problems with today’s society would improve greatly. Overall, I just thought this was an interesting comparison that I caught in class today.
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