In class this week, we discussed Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development and related to them to the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which we are currently reading in class.
Here are Kohlberg's 6 stages:
While discussing Kohlberg, we were given a situation and had to decide for ourselves if we believed it could be justified as moral. The situation was:
In Europe, a woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. the drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to make. He paid $400 for the radium and charged $4,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money and tried every legal means, but he could only get together about $2,000, which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying, and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said, "No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from if." So, having tried every legal means, Heinz gets desperate and considers breaking into the man's store to steal the drug for his wife.
Should Heinz steal the drug?
Many people answered yes. He was trying to save his wife's life. Life trumps the act of stealing the drug. But what if it wasn't his wife who was dying? Would Heinz still be obligated to steal the drug in order to save another human's life? Everybody does deserve the right to live, right?
I believe that many of us would answer that we would save anybody's life because honestly we would like to believe that when faced with that situation we would. However, I do not think that's truly the case. Our world is based on Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest. If we judge someone as inadequate whether they're a bad person or they don't hold up to our standards, I think we'd be less likely to want to save their lives. However, if it was someone close to us, I believe we have a higher initiative to help them. Would you consider saving someone's life who had done bad things in their life? But what if it was a complete stranger? Or a murderer? Do they deserve the right to live? What then constitutes the value of a life?
Jackie,
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that people tend to only do what directly relates to themselves. A person would be devastated at the death of a spouse or a friend, but when one hears about someone else dying, though it is sad, many people don't dwell on it. The thought of them leaves their mind because it is not a part of their day to day lives. All of us would like to think we would help a stranger, but you never know until a situation actually occurs.
Jackie and Dani,
ReplyDeleteI agree with you both that people give more worth to the lives of the ones that they love. There is a monumental difference in reading about deaths in a newspaper or hearing about them on tv, but when it is personal the affect is lasting. While I believe that many would be willing to save the life of a stranger, I believe that it is only applicable if it has no negative affect on their own life. In the situation descibed by Kohlberg, i believe many would not act in the same way for a stranger because the consequences and risk outway the kind act.