When doing this week’s reading, a part that I found of particular interest was the discussions on the different types of lies everyone uses on a frequent basis. When the question was posed at the beginning of this section, “how often do you give answers that you know are untrue”(21), I thought to myself the answer that the reading gave. That I believe myself to be an overall pretty truthful person who does not give answers that I know are untrue frequently. Afterall, our society teaches us from a young age that lying is bad and we should tell the truth. However, through the examination of the different types of lies, I was clearly wrong. I think probably everyone lies in at least one of these categories every day, myself included. Whether it be the simple lie of responding to the question how you are doing today or a lie that we choose to say because we want to manage how others perceive us. I would be honestly curious to see a study that examined the number of lies a group of people commit everyday for a set period of time and how the numbers of lies they commit in actuality compare to the number of lies they would predict they commit.

The discussion of the types of lies and biases we hold also reminded me of concepts I have learned about in my psychology courses. Specifically the discussion of blue lies stuck out to me because it reminded me of the concept of demand characteristics in psychology research. Demand characteristics is the idea that participants behave in the way that they believe the research wants them to, in a sense impression management. Participants want to present favorable outward behaviors or answers that they believe the other person wants to see or hear so they will view the participants positively. I believe blue lies and the presence of demand characteristics in psychology research can be attributed to the fact that everyone in society wants to feel accepted by others so we want to present the version of ourselves that we believe will be accepted most easily by our immediate audience. Therefore we might present a certain version or aspects of our person to certain people and not others depending on what they believe they would be most receptive to.

I have previously taken an IAT in one of my psychology classes so I was aware of what this test would be like and how you could receive results that you did not expect to reflect your biases. I decided to take the Gender-Career IAT. I was both surprised and not surprised by my results that I have little to no automatic preference between gender and family or career. I was surprised because of the history of our society where women are assumed to stay at home and care for the family while men are supposed to be the provider for the family and have a job. This concept of an ideal American family is still prevalent in society today. Going into the IAT I thought this might have more of an impact on my results that it did. However, I am not surprised by my results from the IAT since both of my parents hold the same type of job and worked pretty much the same hours while I was growing up. While many of my friends had a stay at home mom, it was normal for me not to see both of my parents until much later in the evening because they were at work and are both very driven in their careers. Since they had almost identical schedules, they generally split their time the same between their career and family. I believe my own experience with both my parents being dedicated to both career and family influenced my results from this IAT. 

I found the CTAA reading and following podcast very interesting for many reasons. While I was familiar with a few concepts, I found the reading and podcast to be very informative on society. It helped me understand how our society functions and contends with each other, more specifically the role of normative and relative ethical frameworks and how they operate within society. These ideas in the reading made me think of my Justice class were we recently discussed abortion and the varying arguments people may hold following different ethical theories. One argument against abortion that we discussed was that many argue abortion is wrong since a fetus is an innocent person and an innocent person has a right to life, so to kill a fetus by having an abortion would be wrong. However this argument leaves many ideas to be defined in relative terms by each individual. When is a fetus actually considered an innocent person? People with varying viewpoints define that marker of life of a fetus very differently. Arguments in support of abortion often rely on the right of the mother to use her autonomy to make decisions that effect her life and whether she consented to the use of her body by the fetus. Since there is no agreement with the two sides of this argument regarding the practice of abortion, this topic, as well as the concept of the point in which the fetus becomes an innocent person with rights, remains highly controversial. Meaning that there is not one universal truth, as described by normative ethics, about the morality of the practice that can be accepted by all. This is even further seen through how the government struggles to make laws about the legality of abortion. 

One idea that stuck with me from the podcast was the discussion of the varying degrees of killing others and how some are deemed more morally unacceptable and met with harsher punishments. I found this of particular interest because while I readily accepted that murder was more morally unacceptable than unintentional manslaughter, I never really thought about the specific reasoning behind why as a society we considered different levels of killing more morally wrong. However, through this reading and the podcast it was made clear to me how consequentialism, deontic ethics, and aretaic ethics all influence this thinking and our punishments regarding killing. By combining these evaluation means to consider the topic of the morality of the degrees of killing, it is now explicitly clear to me the logic behind our society’s views on this issue. These evaluation means and the roommate with the coffee on your computer analogy also helped me to understand when I would get frustrated with people in my own life because of their actions or the consequences of their actions. In my previous life experience even if I have been inconvenienced or in a sense wronged by the actions of another if I felt that it was an accident, meaning it was unintentional, I find it harder to stay upset with the person or blame them because it was not explicitly their fault since it was not their intention. My feelings with experiences like this is the past now make more sense to me after learning about aretaic ethics.