Creative Project, PHIL 114 Global Moral Issues, Summer 2017, Purdue University

Honor Haiku by Abigail Yarcusko

Creative Project, PHIL 114 Global Moral Issues, Summer 2017, Purdue University

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A man gains support
Actions, innocent lives lost
Regret, sorrow, guilt

Artwork Justification:
In the “Lessons and Legacies” chapter of Anthony Appiah’s ​The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen​, it is stated that “Both recognition and esteem can be distributed by honor codes without any regard for morality” (Appiah, pg 176). In this sentence, the author’s idea of separation between honor and morality becomes apparent. I attempt to represent this in the form of a haiku. With these three lines, I try to illustrate Appiah’s idea that one may have honor from a people, but this honor does not necessarily mean that positive morality is included, and are therefore separate ideas that do not always occur in congruence.

Some Barriers Can’t Be Broken by Abigail Yarcusco

Creative Project, PHIL 114 Global Moral Issues, Summer 2017, Purdue University

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In author Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s book Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club (2011), it is displayed how an international border, no matter how minuscule in defining distance, creates a definite separation for his characters. In my artwork, I focus on the inability to break through all barriers. I specifically reference e-reader version pages 27-28, where the speaker states, “Then it occurred to me that I was afraid … Why couldn’t he leave too? I knew that answer to that question even before I asked it. He wasn’t the leaving kind” (Sáenz, pgs 27-28). In my photo, two women are helplessly in love while separated by a literal barrier, just as the two men in the first chapter of this book are. They have overcome one barrier, that of sexuality, and yet, because of a separation, are kept apart. Thus, barriers perpetuate separation, and borders are never truly broken.

Works Cited: Sáenz, Benjamin Alire. Everything begins & ends at the Kentucky Club: stories.
[E-Reader version]. El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos Press, 2012. Print.

2 Haikus on Altruism by Olivia Urbansk

Creative Project, PHIL 114 Global Moral Issues, Summer 2017, Purdue University

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Haiku #1

Rescue a stranger

Sacrifices of humans

Putting others first

 

Haiku #2

We are animals

Taking care of each other

Survival of gene

For creative project 2, I decided to express my thoughts through two haiku poems based on “The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress” by Peter Singer, published 1981 (reprint 2011). The theme of altruism in the first chapter really spoke to me and how it is shown through both humans and animals. I didn’t really focus on one page in particular because I found the entire chapter permeated with the powerful message of altruism. The themes of animal altruism, evolution, and kin altruism were all new ideas I was exposed to by reading this book and found to be insightful. The strong expressions of survival, putting yourself behind others, and keeping your genes alive, I found to be very inspirational. I tried to express the feelings I experienced when reading the ideas for the first time, and hope readers get my initial feelings by reading them.

Wolf Head on Person, Altruism and Evolution by Zhuoxi Bai

Creative Project, PHIL 114 Global Moral Issues, Summer 2017, Purdue University

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This is the justification based on the book ” The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress.” I think the main point of the book is that many moral processes such as altruism in human are based on biological evolution from earlier social animals. That is also what I was trying to draw here. Peter Singer, author of The Expanding Circle, used wolves to make examples many times, like in page 8 of the paperback edition, to present the evolution of altruism and how it likely occurred in humans. That is why I kept the wolf head on the human.