Tufts Blogs

Coming out of high school, I was certain that I had no idea what to pursue as a major. I saw myself doing physics or economics or pre-med or math or computer science or… the list goes on and on. My interest was primarily in math, but that’s a very broad characterization--it can mean anything from pure mathematics to very applied instances such as engineering--and I was also left open to the question of whether I would want to double major as well. I had some vague notion of what philosophy was from talking to my AP Lit teacher about the novel Brave New World, but that was basically it. So for my first semester, my thoughts for deciding on classes went a bit like this:

“I already know I’m taking a class called Love and Marriage in Medieval French Literature because that’s what my pre-major advisor is teaching. That’s the literature side of my brain taken care of, what next? I should probably take a math class because I’m already considering a math major, and I’ve found an interesting “special topics” intro class called “Combinatorics” that’s only offered this semester. I’ll add an Italian class as a foreign language and intro to ethics because, well, doesn’t that sound interesting?”

For my second semester, I turned to the sciences and took a class in biophysics. It was a supremely interesting class in which we learned about the physics of processes (mostly biological) that happen at a micro scale--how movement is possible at small scales, how we can stretch DNA, how osmosis really works, and so on. It might have convinced me to take on a physics major, but I was also taking a bioethics class at the same time, and that solidified my love of philosophy. In that class, we met for just under 3 hours every Wednesday and continually discussed significant ethical issues. Issues that broadly spanned the ethics of: creating and ending life, autonomy and death. It was the first class at Tufts that made me certain what I wanted to study. Talking about these issues and seeing how rigorous, logical, quasi-mathematical argument is possible when talking about issues pertinent to life made me realize that everyone should take a class like that.

In my fall semester sophomore year, I had deep-seated issues about the foundations of ethics. For a whole year I took classes on ethics and applied ethics, learned how to reason about specific issues such as euthanasia, and argued over different ethical frameworks that govern what is right and wrong. At the end of all this, I was left wondering whether there was any objectivity to this or whether all of ethics and morality was merely a matter of personal opinion. To be honest, I was horrified by the idea that morality might be completely subjective, that each person’s own conception of it was as equally valid as anyone else’s. That would mean that truly terrible people’s actions weren’t “wrong” in any meaningful way. So, I took a course called “metaethics” to learn about questions pertaining to the foundations of ethics and decide whether or not it’s objective.

At this point, I’m still not sure at all what the answer is, but I realize that the only way I’ll ever know is if I take more philosophy classes. That’s why I’m taking courses in epistemology and the philosophy of language. I plan on taking as many philosophy classes as possible while I’m still here because learning this subject in collaborative and open discussions is something that’s best done at a university.