1. Selfishness vs. Compassion
The people of the Stone Age had very little or no concept of morality. Men who lived in the Stone Age believed that dragging around a mate by the ends of her hair was not only acceptable, but it reared one's pride and displayed a sign of power among the males, which comes much to the disgust of today's women because now it would be considered sexist just to even think of it, when men and women are equal as far as the role of gender is concerned. ... One large stepping stone in the world of morality came about in around 1800 B.C. when a king created a set of laws that everyone was to ...
The Lottery is the annual stoning of a member of the town who wins (308-15). Children gather stones and await the excision of the family lucky enough to unfortunately pull a dot from the historically ancient lottery box. ... Jackson has given a good example of how easily people give in to groups because of their traditions and their fear of rejection, " The children had stones already and someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles" (Lessing 315). ...
Tim O"Brien's The Things They Carried is a tale that deals not only with the risk of war, but also with the emotional effects it has on the young soldiers. Lt. Jimmy Cross is the designated leader. All of the men in the troop carried various items with them, both physically and emotionally. After th...
Actions Must Be Made On Maxims Maxims play an important role in making decisions. Some think that all decisions ought to be made by maxims and that any certain maxim should never be broken. For this to be possible the maxim would have to be perfect which is almost impossible. This is why it is p...
But hardly anyone had that onion, and if he did, he could not find it in his heart to give it away, for the war had turned his heart to stone. (21) Korczak, if he had had that onion, would have given it to the child who asked without regret, knowing that he had just saved the child's life for another day, and hoping that he had helped to teach the child that there was compassion to be found in the world, though for the "poorest and most abandoned children in the world" (13), it must have seemed that all of the world was bleak and bare, without comfort or respite. The war never t...
In the essay, "Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem," Ericc Fromm discusses the seductive comforts of obedience, and he makes distinctions among varieties of obedience. Adam and Eve were believed to be the start of history. They started in the Garden of Eden. This garden was their home....
To help everyone understand where I"m coming from, I"m going to explain where I've been. I was born in the high-rate crime city of New Orleans, Louisiana. I lived there until the age of eleven. Then my life was suddenly uprooted to three hours north of everything I ever cared about. Now I will t...
Ethics and Decision Making According to Making Sense of Ethics article "Ethics refers to principles that define behavior as right, good and proper. Such principles do not always dictate a single "moral" course of action, but provide a means of evaluating and deciding among competing options." The ...
Notions of good and evil are essentially dependent on social and cultural constructs, making conflicts over morality open to debate. In order to understand moral action, individuals often focus more on the context of the action than any innate moral code. In Carol Reed's 1949, noir style film The Th...
Utilitarianism and Kantian Thinking Ethics is one part of philosophy that will always be studied, and like most subjects in philosophy, will never be viewed the same by everyone. There are so many cultures that have so many different beliefs about the way a person's life should be lived out. Things...
Langston Hughes short, essay "Salvation" describes an experience at the young age of 12 that unfolds into feelings of drama, guilt, deception, and grief. He shared with us the story of how he felt obligated to receive Christ by his Aunts' church congregation. Confused and alone, he struggled to unde...
Lord of the Flies In the novel Lord of the Flies, Golding represents several personality types, ranging from the moral Piggy to the pure Simon to the evil, satanic Roger. The personalities are astoundingly clear, mainly because being marooned on the island and having to resort to primitive ways...
There are many similarities and differences between Hammurabi's laws, the Hittites laws, and the Hebrew Laws. Each of these codes provided a society with a system of rules to live and abide by. Without these sets of laws the civilizations of that time would have been very uncivilized, chaos would oc...
Thomas Hardy, one of the greatest Victorian novelists and the author of Tess D'Urbervilles, was born June 2, 1840, in the village of Upper Bockhampton, located in Southwestern England. His father was a stone mason and a violinist while his mother had had a passion for music, enjoying reading and rel...
