In my Philosophy class, I have been doing a lot of research on this guy on Kant and I learned a lot about what reasons mean in a philosophical perspective and I want to share it with all of you.

You may have never noticed it, but there is always something going on around you, regardless of what city or country you reside in. Events happen all over the place, billions upon billions of them are taking place across the globe each and every day. It is possible that you may be the source of this event, you may just be one small link in a chain of events, or you may never be involved in certain events.

Some of these happenings seem big and may garner large amounts of interest such as death, celebrity appearances, and suspenseful sporting events such as the Super Bowl. On the other hand, there will also be a large amount of small events taking place all over that can range from the train being late to an ice cream cone falling to the ground.

It may be true that some events appear to happen for no reason at all, but more often than not, there will be a reason for virtually every event that takes place at almost every time and location. For instance, let’s take a quick look at death. There are a variety of reasons as to why somebody’s life would come to an end. To me, there are four main reasons for death which include murder, suicide, old age, and disease. These are four very different reasons as to why this one event takes place, however it’s a lot more complicated than that.

Well apparently, not only does virtually every event happen for a reason, each event may happen for ten, a hundred, or maybe even a thousand different reasons. However, do all these random reasons matter? Are these reasons significant to society? Let’s quickly compare reasons to baseball cards in a supply and demand society. Each year, Topps manufactures ten thousand cards for each number in its base series. They produce this number because they believe that if they produce more, the demand for the cards would fall and as a result, the value of each card would drop. The most notable instance of this took place during the late 1980’s when Topps produced five times as many cards and as a result, cards where worthless, sometimes less than one cent per 25 cards.

Are reasons similar to baseball cards in this theoretical sense of supply and demand? The value of baseball cards drops as more and more cards are produced. Therefore, if there are more and more reasons for one event taking place, would the value of each individual reason decrease? This could be true when you use reasons as excuses over and over again. A common situation where excuses are used is in the average American classroom. A teacher asks her students if they did their homework and they give the teacher multiple reasons as to why they do not have their homework. One student says that he overslept and forgot to put it in his bag, one says she couldn’t print it, one kid says the dog ate it, while another kid simply says he forgot to do it. These are each a different reasons for the same event, however the teacher hears the same reason over and over to a point where these reasons, become more and more unbelievable, and lose value as a result.

According to Kant, doing something that you have good reason to do may be considered to be a good action. He believes that if somebody does something with good reason, that person is performing the action voluntarily and is not obligated to perform that action, and that doing something with good reason is also the rational thing to do.

I agree with Kant; however I also believe that reasons tell us a lot more. I believe that reasons can tell us more about who a person really is.

Let’s quickly take a look back at death, one of the big events mentioned earlier. Now let’s look at murder, the first of these four reasons. Murder may be the reason for death, however what are the reasons for murder? you start thinking about each individual event, you may begin to realize that each reason may lead to another reason. Let’s say that the murderer had been our subject’s best friend and co-worker at Madison Square Garden. What was his reason for killing his best friend? Was it for revenge? If the murder took place as an act of revenge, we must think about what is the reason for revenge? Did the victim do something that he didn’t like? We must also think begin to understand what the reason for that was. Other reasons for the murder could also include Jealousy, to obtain something from the victim, to keep him quite for some reason, or perhaps it could have even been an accident.

The long list of reasons does not end there, now we must learn how the murder took place. For instance, what was his reason for shooting him instead of poisoning him? If a gun was used, now there may be a reason as to why the murderer had a gun in the first place. Maybe he had committed a previous crime, which leads to another series of reasons, or maybe he had it for protection, which may have even more reasons. This list of reasons may keep going on and on, with no exact source that had led to this chain of events.

The same ideas work with the other main reasons for death. What was his reason for committing suicide? Did he lose his job? If he did lose his job, there must have been a reason as to why he lost his job. Maybe he lost his girlfriend for a variety of reasons. Maybe he was even homeless which could contain all of these reasons. The reason he was homeless was because his girlfriend kicked him out, the reason for him living with his girlfriend in the first place was because he lost his apartment, and the reason he lost his apartment was because he could not afford to keep it because he lost his job. Like murder, reasons for suicide could possibly be traced back through hundreds of events, some of which may not even involve him. Let’s imagine that he was fired because MSG lost a billion dollars and had to fire 50 workers, the reason for losing all that money could have been because other people made terrible decisions that caused the company to lose all that money.

Just like these past two reasons for death, there are many reasons for why somebody dies due to a disease. What was the reason for the person obtaining the disease? Was a certain disease passed down from his father? Then what was the reason for his father having the disease? Who knows, maybe his extensive smoking had been the reason for having a severe heart attack when he was only 30 years old.

According to these last few paragraphs, reasons can tell us people’s motives, we can help people, and we better society. If our reasons for doing things didn’t matter, we would know even less of the condition of man.