F.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau was one of the most famous and influential philosophers of the French Enlightenment
in the eighteenth century. In his book The Social Contract, he elaborated his theory of human nature. In
Rousseau, a new era of sentimental piety found its beginning.
According to Rousseau, the state owes its origin to a social contract freely entered into by its
members; the EDSA Revolution is an example, though an imperfect one. While Rousseau interpreted the
idea in terms of absolute democracy and individualism, Hobbes developed his idea in favour of absolute
monarchy.
Both Rousseau and Hobbes have one thing in common, that is, they believe that human beings
have to form a community or civil community to protect themselves from one another, because the
nature of human beings is to wage war against one another, and since by nature, humanity tends toward
self-preservation, then it follows that they have to come to a free mutual agreement to protect
themselves.
Hobbes thought that to end the continuous and self-destructive condition of warfare, humanity
founded the state with its sovereign power of control by means of a mutual consent. On the other hand,
Rousseau believed that a human being is born free and good. Now, he is in chains and has become bad
due to the evil influence of society, civilization, learning, and progress. Hence, from these come
dissension, conflict, fraud, and deceit. Therefore, a human being lost his original goodness, his primitive
tranquillity of spirit.
To restore peace, his freedom should be brought back, and as he returned to his true self, he
saw the necessity and came to form the state through the social contract whereby everyone grants his
individual rights to the general will. The term "social contract" is not an actual historical event. It is a
philosophical fiction, a metaphor, and a certain way of looking at a society of voluntary collection of
agreeable individuals. However, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights constituted as an instance of a
social contract, is not a metaphor but an actual agreement and actually "signed" by the people or their
representatives (Solomon & Higgins, 1996). The 1986 EDSA Revolution is an example of people who
gathered to voice their disenchantment peacefully and through mutual effort, ousted Marcos. This had
inspired changes not only in the Philippines but also in other countries such as the Perestroika
Reformation in eastern Europe. There must be a common power or government which the plurality of
individuals (citizens) should confer all their powers and strength into (freedom) one will (ruler).

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Evaluating and Exercising Prudence in Choices

For B. F. Skinner, the environment selects which is similar
with natural selection. We must take into account what the
environment does to an organism not only before, but also after it
responds. Skinner (in Yelon, 1996) maintained that behavior is
shaped and maintained by its consequences. Behavior that
operates upon the environment to produce consequences (operant
conditioning) can be studied by arranging environments in which
specific consequences are contingent upon it. The second result is
practical; the environment can be manipulated.
Yelon (1996) accepted that behavioral psychology is at fault
for having overanalyzed the words "reward" and "punishment."
 We might have miscalculated the effect of the environment in an individual. There should be a balance
in our relationship with others and the environment. In our dealing
with our fellow human beings, there is the strong and obvious temptation to blame the environment if
they do not conform to our expectations.
The question of freedom arises. Can an individual be free? According to Skinner, our struggle for
freedom is not due to a will to be free as for Aristotle or Sartre, but to certain behavioral processes
characteristic of the human organism, the chief effect of which is the avoidance of or escape from
"aversive" features of the environment.
The feeling of freedom, according to Skinner, becomes an unreliable guide as soon as would-be
controllers turn to non-aversive measures as they are likely to avoid the problems raised when the
controller escapes or attacks. For example, a skillful parent learns to reward a child for good behavior
rather than punish him for bad. Control becomes necessary in the issue of freedom.
Following the adage of John Stuart Mill, "Liberty consists in doing what one desires," Skinner
stated that when a person wants something, he acts to get it when the occasion arises. Skinner argued
that even though behavior is completely determined, it is better that a person "feels free" or "believes
that he is free."
The issue is controllability. We cannot change genetic defects by punishment; we can work only
through genetic measures that operate on a much longer time scale. What must be changed is not the
responsibility of autonomous individual but the conditions, environment, or genetics of which a person's
behavior is a function. Example, a student was praised by a teacher who said to him, "Very good!" for a
solution to a problem or for giving the said correct answer to a question.
Skinner thought that the problem is to free human beings not from control but from certain
kinds of control, and it can be solved only if we accept the fact that we depend on the world around us
and we simply change the nature of dependency. Skinner proposed that to make the social environment
as free as possible of aversive stimuli, we do not need to destroy the environment or escape from it.
What is needed, according to Skinner, is to redesign it.
Life is full of paradoxes. Nobody could nor should control it. We have to be open to life, learn to
accept, and live with paradoxes. Learning with contradiction is not the same as living in contradiction.
The paradoxes account for the reasons why life cannot be held still. Defining or conceptualizing insists on
regarding one aspect of life at the same time disregarding the other.
In the spirituality of imperfection, we learn to accept that life, our environment, is both "evil"
and "good." In recognizing life's open-endedness, we learn to be flexible and adaptable. B. F. Skinner
believed that morality is a conditioned response impressed on the child by society. Despite this view,
however, creating a static environment such as a controlled environment is not applicable in the realities
of everyday world (Schouten & Looren de Jong, 2012).
Skinner is right, however, in pointing out the influence of environment especially in the
socialization of children. Unfortunately, there is an emphasis nowadays in the acquisition of money,
property, and prestige, regardless of values-or lack of those-that children learn.
There should not only be a re-engineering of the environment, but also a total transformation of
how we view our environment beginning with our own orientation. How do we view life? is it merely a
life concerned with power that, according to Buddha, is the cause of despair? Or should it be a life of
cooperation, vision, and concern with other living beings?
Indeed, the theory of freedom has negative and positive tasks. Our lives should not be merely
controlled by rewards and punishments. As human beings, we are capable of reaching different levels of
heights and ideals. According to Yelon, punishment is an educative measure, and as such is a means to
the formation of motives, which are in part to prevent the wrongdoer from repeating the act and in part
to prevent others from committing a similar act. Analogously, in the case of reward, we are concerned
with incentive (Schouten & Looren de Jong, 2012).
 However, much more important than the question of when a person is said to be responsible is
that of when he himself feels responsible. Evidently, not merely that it was he who took the steps
required for its performance but there must be added awareness that he did it "independently" or " of
his own initiative." This feeling is the consciousness of freedom, which is merely the knowledge of having
acted on one's own desires. "One's own desires" are those which have their origin in the regularity of
one's character in the given situation, and are not imposed by an external power, such as a stimulus. The
absence of external power expresses itself in the well-known feeling that one could also have acted
otherwise.
Indeed, the environment plays a significant part in our lives. However, since the Stone Age, we
have proven that we are not completely under its mercy. We have tamed and shall continue to tame and
adapt to the changes in the conditions of the environment. As Plato believed, the soul of every individual
possesses the power of learning the truth and living in a society that is in accordance to its nature.
We are responsible, whether we admit it or not, for what is in our power to do. Most of the
time, we cannot be sure what it is in our power to do until we attempt to do it. In spite of the alleged
inevitabilities in personal life and history, human effort can redetermine the direction of events even
though it cannot determine the conditions that make human effort possible.
It is true that we did not choose to be born. It is also true that we choose to keep on living. It is
not true that everything that happens to us is like @being struck down by a dreadful disease.” To use as
an illustration, the treatment and cure of disease would never serve as a moral paradigm for the whole
human that were did not have to be, that they could be different, and that we could make them
different. What we can make different, we are responsible for.