Ale Ortiz
TOK
Block 1 - Hunt
Aug/22/2014
TOK Blog Post
To what extent should we use our own humanity to study human behaviour?
The word “humanity”, in its own sense, can have various amounts of interpretations and implications. Depending on how one chooses to define it, an answer to the prompt found above will come about invariably different. I interpret humanity in two very different ways. In one sense, I see humanity from a very philosophical perspective which is heavily influenced by ethics and metaphysics. On the other hand, I also interpret humanity from a very literal sense. Humanity, to me, could also mean what is it that literally makes humans, humans.In that sense, conditions such as emotions, actions, reactions, perceptions, and values are all different components that are part of it. It is important to mention that the knowledge question above addresses whether we should study the human behaviour, so because of that I’ll be working with a combination of areas of knowledge and ways of knowing in order to answer to what extent we should actually use our own humanity to do such thing. Namely, the area of knowledge who could be potentially addressed is economics and the way of knowing would be emotion.
Economics has been, for a very long time, an extremely important social science who has served humanity throughout history in various different kinds of ways. It helped human beings address problems such as criminality, social relations, financial decisions, etc. As a social science, economics’ job is to study how and why human beings make the decisions they make and its primary function is to answer three very basic questions. The basic questions are what to produce, how to produce it, and for whom to produce it. These three basic inquisitive statements which guide the field of economics are what construct the building blocks for what the science is as, not only field of study, but also an area of knowledge. The reason why I choose to use economics as an area of knowledge to answer whether human beings should study the human behaviour is because, as a field of study, it is very much based upon the preposition that economics’ idea and theories are very much centred upon the fact that it can and it can not be biased. For as we know, economics as a field of study sprung out of very philosophical roots. It dates back to Adam Smith, known as the father of modern economics, who, after all, was a professor of moral philosophy in Scotland. If one chooses to argue that economics should be used in order to study human behaviour, such person would have to accept the claim that there would no complete certainty to its conclusions because of the extremely bias nature that economics holds within itself. To make such statement clearer I will illustrate an example.
Karl Marx and Adam Smith were too economists with completely different views on how economics should impact society. While the former argued for a complete utopia guided by a government-controlled economy based upon a classless society devoid of a currency and strongly in favor of complete equality, the latter favoured a society deprived of strong government-lead economic society in where all individuals wouldn't act in favour of the groups interest, like Marx thought they should, but in each owns interest because in the end thats what would lead to the most prosperous outcome. Although these two economists weren’t contemporaries, their insightful ideas into how societies should economically organize themselves certainly are a debate until today. The point is that if we choose look and see whether we should study the human behaviour through the lenses of economics is that it is certainly flawed. We don’t know who is more or less right. It is flawed because of what I have already mentioned, there is no certainty to what will take place or what will happen because it is literally impossible for economics to illustrate, with very high certainty, the complex human behaviour through theories and ideas exactly because human behaviour is extremely volatile and unpredictable. Therefore it has to make generalisations about humans beings’ actions. We see the weakness of economics’ actions when choosing it to study human behaviour in the society of today because it can cause massive amounts of damage to the world. This is certainly evidenced by the Great Depression of 1929 which left millions in poverty world wide, and the 2008 financial crisis which again did the same thing.But at the same time, the paradox that my claim creates when we actually analyse another aspect of the real world makes someone literally open their mouth with amazement. The economics of Adam Smith served the world in ways that were thought unimaginable centuries ago when men were mere sailors looking to expand their so called empires. It has produced extreme advancements in technology, helped people fight poverty, deal with crime, and improve medical aid worldwide. And even though no one can claim that Smith’s quote “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest”, which representes the global economy system of today, has had nothing but positives effects, it has certainly served society with greater benefits than drawbacks. So yes, it is fair to say that economics is an extremely flawed way of studying the human behaviour, but at the same time there is no denying that it is extremely effective at the same time.
Furthermore, it is interesting to analyse emotion as tool used to study the human behaviour. First of all, it is important to mention that reason and emotion are not two completely opposites of the spectrum. Emotions can be reasonable, and therefore justified. But at the same time, emotions can be unreasonable and therefore lead to clouded judgement. And whether we should see if emotion is a valid way to study the human behaviour, personally I would it should not be used in order to study human behaviour. Emotions, to a certain extent are not something we control, they are chemical reactions in our brain which lead us to act a certain way. There is something extremely interesting which was studied in the TOK course and that is emotional intelligence. At its core, emotional intelligence dictates how well people can deal with their emotions. People with high emotional intelligence are able to effectively deal with their emotions and not let them take over control of their reason, vice-versa people with low emotional intelligence have a hard time dealing with their emotions and are easily susceptible to acting upon how and what they feel when leading with different situations when affected by sense of emotional intensity. The problem with emotion as a tool to study human behaviour is that most of the people aren’t very emotionally intelligent and therefore let their decisions be clouded by what they feel, and not by what they reason. If someone chooses to study how human behaviour, but they have low emotional intelligence, and for example, they are personally affect by what they are studying, then maybe their conclusions would come about with an extremely low degree of validity and therefor not really help society by doing their studying. For example if a Cuban historian who lived under the Cuban Revolution chooses to study Che Guevara as historical figure, but he is emotionally affected by the things that have happen to him or his family during the revolution, a very sketchy and biased representation of Che as a figure would come about. Truth wouldn’t be this historians first preoccupation when writing about such figure.
In the end, it is important for me to conclude that economics as a social science, although highly flawed at times, is an extremely important and useful social tool to study human behaviour and emotion as an extremely inefficient tool to also study human behaviour. Although I have two different opinions about the the different things I talked about, it is also important for me to conclude that yes, we should use our humanity to study the human behaviour. But we should use those parts of out humanity which can be effective and disregard those which can not. In this case, we should used economics and disregard emotion as something we should really look into.
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Ale, you have covered a lot of ground here with respect to economics. I can see that you're both interested and knowledgeable, and you seem to have a ready supply of examples and quotations to work with. To improve your post you need to focus. How? Well, you had an interesting set up in the introduction but after you introduced it you dropped it. You suggested that there are two meanings for the word "humanity." You could have followed this. Do the two different meanings lead to different answers to the question? Then you made another interesting distinction, which you also dropped after making it. You said that economics tries to answer 3 basic questions. It would be interesting to follow each one of those and see the extent to which an economist uses his or her own humanity to find an answer. I also think your paragraph on emotion has potential. I'd like to see you dig into the ways in which the emotions of the human scientist might help or hinder research. You just sort of floated over it, and then you used a history example rather than a human science one. In addition to working on focusing in on what should be there, you can also work on filtering out information that doesn't have much to do with the question. If the statement helps answer the question, use it, and be explicit about how exactly it answers the question. and finally, try to use more of the vocabulary and concepts from the course. There are many overall ToK ideas and ideas specific to the human sciences unit that you can easily incorporate. They are all in your textbook.
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