Ariely: Are People Simply Fickle?

Are people simply fickle?
On a daily basis, as human beings, people interact. These interactions occur in many ways through talking, touching, presence and most frequently without individuals even being aware they are occurring. Subconsciously, an individual chooses to surround oneself with people that are similar to their own character. The way that individuals act with one another, is a basis for the ethical theories of philosophers. In the case of Appiah, his theory is that people behave in different ways at different times and can be inconsistent. Ariely shares a very similar view that consists of how an individual will act when given an immoral situation. On the other hand, Aristotle’s theory can be boiled down to states that one must …show more content…
His theory is based upon an idea he calls “Predictable Rationality”. This particular philosophical approach differs from the before mentioned because it is based upon an experiment. This experiment was to test how people cheat and when they cheat the most. What was pulled from the experiment was not that a few people cheat a lot, it was that a lot of people cheat a little. Human beings have a tendency to behave in an immoral way but only to a degree so they can still feel good about themselves. A person will always act in their own best interest unless they are reminded of what being morally sound looks like. Ariely tested this idea in an experiment and the results are very similar to what one would expect to occur. “The moment people thought about trying to recall The Ten Commandments, they stopped cheating.” (Ariely, 8:16) By nature, people take the path of least resistance to achieve a desired outcome. However, when they are reminded of morality, like in the experiment, they now feel a need to do the right thing. It is not that they believe it to be the right thing, but that now they feel a sense of obligation having just been reminded of morality through the use of The Ten Commandments. Now, it is not that everyone in the experiment was religious, but that they were now more aware of what was right, and what was wrong. By doing this, human beings have …show more content…
Ariely and Appiah are two philosophers that have a differing view in the technical sense, but the basis of the two are more alike than many realize. They both, similarly, believe that the character that humans exhibit is fickle in nature. While on the other hand, Aristotle idea of the highest good, is translated as flourishing and happiness. The two ideas are inherently different on a basic level. On one hand, the two philosophers are stating that human being are unpredictable in nature, and the lone philosopher is claiming in order to live a truly happy life, one must be completely virtuous 100% of the time. One may argue that human beings do not truly know what an absolute virtue consists of and therefore they could already be coexisting. Appiah states this outright when discussing full virtue. “But, given the depressing situationist reality, maybe no human being really is (fully) virtuous. And even if a few people did get to be virtuous against all the odds, we would have to have some way of identifying them, before we could see what they would do.” (Appiah 409). However, on the counter side, this is not a matter of whether or not full virtue is obtainable, but rather that if they were, an individual would have no definitive way of