Kate Chopin's The Awakening is a great example of how everyone should be given equal opportunities to an extent. Obviously not everyone can have the exact same opportunities because of different economic statuses that can't be controlled, but uncontrollable statuses should not affect opportunities. In the past, it was a very common occurrence for the white male to be chosen in the case of two equally qualified candidates. Since then, affirmative action was instated to help correct this action. In my opinion thought, it did not fix the error, it only made it happen in a different way. With affirmative action, the minority would likely be chosen instead. This could help adjust for more white men being chosen in the past to give minorities a boost at first, but it still doesn't seem right to me.
Recently though, Affirmative Action is being overturned in supreme court cases. For example, Michigan banned affirmative action last year, but the case made it to the supreme court where it was upheld and decided that affirmative action was as bad as choosing whites over other races because it was still racial profiling. In my opinion, the better way of handling the issue is with the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, which protects U.S. employees from being discriminated upon by their race/sex/religion etc. This act was passed in 1965, but affirmative action has still taken place for a while even though it goes against Equal Opportunity. It makes sense that they need to make up for wrongdoings in the past, but it still seems like rejecting whites in favor of others to get subsidies isn't right.This issue of equal opportunity is seen in The Awakening where the protagonist, Edna, ultimately chooses to kill herself because she realizes she will never get the opportunity to fulfill her dreams. The ending is controversial because some believe that her never achieving her goals was not a good way to end it. However, I agree with Chopin's decision to end the book the way she did because it showed how the society that existed when she wrote it would not let her ever break free no matter how hard she tried.
Saturday, February 28, 2015
Saturday, January 31, 2015
The Freedom of Choice
In modern developed countries, we take it for granted that we have the right to make our own choices. For example, women now have the ability to choose their role in society. Women can still choose to stay at home and just take care of family, but they can also enter the working force. This is not the result of any legislature. Instead, it is the result of a societal change. In the past, it was assumed that all women would stay at home to manage the household. That is the society seen in A Thousand Splendid Suns. To go against the stiff mold set would be to go against all of society, which would be impossible.
In Part I of Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns, a woman is forced to marry against her will. In the past in the United States, and presently in some other countries, arranged marriages are/were common. As countries develop though, the freedom of choice grows and it becomes more socially accepted for the people to pick their own spouses. As we see in A Thousand Splendid Suns, forcing someone to make a choice they oppose causes them to resent the result. Jalil forces his daughter, Mariam, to marry off to Rasheed. Mariam opposes the marriage, but is forced to agree to it. The marriage is thus built on top of lies, so it makes everyone anger. In democracies, which are becoming much more common around the world over time, the majority make the choices to an extent. Since the majority are taking some power, it makes sense that now the majority are being given more social rights to choose. People expect that everyone should have a say, so parents no longer impose the marriage onto their children. A stigma has arisen around forcing people to do things because it defies someone's natural rights.
The most contemporary application of the freedom of choice is abortion. I don't expect abortion to be made illegal because it is the choice of the mother before her child has been born, and the United States is a developed country. It is run through a democracy where every person has the choice to vote how the country will be run. It would be ironic if abortion were made illegal because of this. In my opinion, it is best the abortion remains legal because the mothers didn't always have the choice of whether to create the baby, as rape is not an entirely rare occurrence. We can't completely take away women's right to choose whether or not to have a baby by banning abortions. However, it is a tricky topic because you could also argue that you can't take away the babies choice to live. I think that ultimately the mother's choice will win because their decisions can be more obviously discerned than the unborn babies'.
In Part I of Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns, a woman is forced to marry against her will. In the past in the United States, and presently in some other countries, arranged marriages are/were common. As countries develop though, the freedom of choice grows and it becomes more socially accepted for the people to pick their own spouses. As we see in A Thousand Splendid Suns, forcing someone to make a choice they oppose causes them to resent the result. Jalil forces his daughter, Mariam, to marry off to Rasheed. Mariam opposes the marriage, but is forced to agree to it. The marriage is thus built on top of lies, so it makes everyone anger. In democracies, which are becoming much more common around the world over time, the majority make the choices to an extent. Since the majority are taking some power, it makes sense that now the majority are being given more social rights to choose. People expect that everyone should have a say, so parents no longer impose the marriage onto their children. A stigma has arisen around forcing people to do things because it defies someone's natural rights.
The most contemporary application of the freedom of choice is abortion. I don't expect abortion to be made illegal because it is the choice of the mother before her child has been born, and the United States is a developed country. It is run through a democracy where every person has the choice to vote how the country will be run. It would be ironic if abortion were made illegal because of this. In my opinion, it is best the abortion remains legal because the mothers didn't always have the choice of whether to create the baby, as rape is not an entirely rare occurrence. We can't completely take away women's right to choose whether or not to have a baby by banning abortions. However, it is a tricky topic because you could also argue that you can't take away the babies choice to live. I think that ultimately the mother's choice will win because their decisions can be more obviously discerned than the unborn babies'.
Tuesday, December 30, 2014
The Inevitability of War
It is obvious that if it were possible, almost everyone on the planet today would choose to avoid war. Unfortunately though, one party always seems to start war in an attempt to make the rest of the world follow their same beliefs. According to their moral code, they do nothing wrong by starting war because their enemies were being 'bad' in their eyes. As an American, it's easy for me to say that terrorists or the Axis in WWII for example were the bad guys, since what they were doing isn't morally correct for me. But for them, they were the good guys because they honestly believed that Americans should die, or that the Arian race was superior. Who are we, the Americans, to say they were wrong? What gives us the power to decide? We could just say no more fighting or war, but then there's an issue if another country does something bad. If we fight them, we are saying that we are superior judges who are, for some reason, allowed to break the rules. This would give them reason to fight us, because then they can argue they're judges equally, and thus can break the rules as well.
Because of this, I believe war is an unavoidable thing, but I think we are moving towards a better way of managing it. Presently, the United Nations is a very effective way of managing war. Obviously we can't just ban war altogether, because then we would have no power to enforce the rules with. But we can make a list of common moral offenses (based on the majority of cultures' moral codes) that will have penalties. One country alone then does not have the power to decide if another country is right or wrong. Instead, conventions of many nations will decide, and thus hopefully be correct more often.
Kurt Vonnegut uses his novel, Slaughterhouse 5, to try to bring the idiocy of war to light. He doesn't write the novel to detail the atrocities of war. Instead, he writes it to show how pointless war is. I don't entirely agree with Vonnegut's view. I think war does have many atrocities that would preferably be avoided, but if someone violates the common moral code of many cultures then war is inevitable. There is a purpose behind a majority of wars. Without war, Hitler would have killed many more many more in his quest for dominance. You can look at all the deaths in WWII and say it killed lots of people on both sides for no reason, and reason that the war was pointless. In my opinion though, the war was fought to prevent many more casualties, and to keep the world a better place afterwards by removing things like concentration camps.
Because of this, I believe war is an unavoidable thing, but I think we are moving towards a better way of managing it. Presently, the United Nations is a very effective way of managing war. Obviously we can't just ban war altogether, because then we would have no power to enforce the rules with. But we can make a list of common moral offenses (based on the majority of cultures' moral codes) that will have penalties. One country alone then does not have the power to decide if another country is right or wrong. Instead, conventions of many nations will decide, and thus hopefully be correct more often.
Kurt Vonnegut uses his novel, Slaughterhouse 5, to try to bring the idiocy of war to light. He doesn't write the novel to detail the atrocities of war. Instead, he writes it to show how pointless war is. I don't entirely agree with Vonnegut's view. I think war does have many atrocities that would preferably be avoided, but if someone violates the common moral code of many cultures then war is inevitable. There is a purpose behind a majority of wars. Without war, Hitler would have killed many more many more in his quest for dominance. You can look at all the deaths in WWII and say it killed lots of people on both sides for no reason, and reason that the war was pointless. In my opinion though, the war was fought to prevent many more casualties, and to keep the world a better place afterwards by removing things like concentration camps.
Sunday, November 30, 2014
Moral Codes: Good or Bad?
Clashes of cultures happen all around the world, at nearly any given time in history. Moral codes have violated each other since the crusades and earlier, and over recent events like the verdict in Ferguson. People will always have differing opinions. Sometimes these opinions can be right or wrong, but are often very subjective still. Subjective clashes of cultures were very apparent in Things Fall Apart. One example of these was Okonkwo's hanging at the end. The foreign soldiers didn't understand why they had to be the ones to take down the body; to them, it didn't matter who did it. They didn't understand the tribe's different moral code. To the tribe, it would violate their moral code for anyone in the town to touch the body. Would it actually matter who took it down in the end? As an outsider, its easy to say no, but we have no proof of this. Cultural Relativism is a theory that says since the tribe believes it does matter and outsides believe it doesn't, we can conclude that neither group is 'right'; it is simply a subjective matter and there are multiple answers.
In one chapter of our U.S. history textbook, The Pageant, the possibility that slavery was good for the slaves and was not a bad practice was mentioned in an excerpt. Many cultures' moral codes conflicted over the topic of slavery. Even within the United States, the North mostly believed slavery was bad, and the South mostly believed it was good. Who are we to say which one was right? This is a case where Cultural Relativism seems to fall apart. Cultural Relativism would suggest that both opinions must be considered, and therefore that neither are right, slavery is neither good nor bad. However, two groups thinking differently about it does not mean there is no true answer. Logically, since slavery violates basic human rights, it can be considered bad.
This means we can say that the South's moral code was not perfect. However, this was one flaw in it; every moral code that exists today will have flaws throughout it. This does not mean that moral codes in general are bad though. They are a collection of opinions, so they can have parts that are right or wrong. I think that if someone went through every part of every cultures moral code, they could combine the good parts to form a correct moral code. But I don't think that the other flawed moral codes are bad, since they do still contain many valuable correct parts most of the time.
The theory of Cultural Relativism does focus on this open-mindedness, which is beneficial to any culture. Rigidly staying with one moral code is bad; it will have flaws, and none of them will be fixed. By opening the moral code to suggestions from other cultures, a society allows these flaws to be fixed as times goes on. I think this is the most important thing to keep in mind when following a moral code. You may strongly believe one moral code over others, but you must also concede that it is not flawless, and therefore that it must be changed if some aspects of other moral codes are more accurate.
In one chapter of our U.S. history textbook, The Pageant, the possibility that slavery was good for the slaves and was not a bad practice was mentioned in an excerpt. Many cultures' moral codes conflicted over the topic of slavery. Even within the United States, the North mostly believed slavery was bad, and the South mostly believed it was good. Who are we to say which one was right? This is a case where Cultural Relativism seems to fall apart. Cultural Relativism would suggest that both opinions must be considered, and therefore that neither are right, slavery is neither good nor bad. However, two groups thinking differently about it does not mean there is no true answer. Logically, since slavery violates basic human rights, it can be considered bad.
This means we can say that the South's moral code was not perfect. However, this was one flaw in it; every moral code that exists today will have flaws throughout it. This does not mean that moral codes in general are bad though. They are a collection of opinions, so they can have parts that are right or wrong. I think that if someone went through every part of every cultures moral code, they could combine the good parts to form a correct moral code. But I don't think that the other flawed moral codes are bad, since they do still contain many valuable correct parts most of the time.
The theory of Cultural Relativism does focus on this open-mindedness, which is beneficial to any culture. Rigidly staying with one moral code is bad; it will have flaws, and none of them will be fixed. By opening the moral code to suggestions from other cultures, a society allows these flaws to be fixed as times goes on. I think this is the most important thing to keep in mind when following a moral code. You may strongly believe one moral code over others, but you must also concede that it is not flawless, and therefore that it must be changed if some aspects of other moral codes are more accurate.
Thursday, October 30, 2014
Guiding hand or choices... or fate?
When we talk about fate, our first thought is of some type of God or other superior power. The opposite of this is then to not have someone controlling it, to be able to make your own decisions and affect the outcome of things. I don't think these are the only two choices though. When I think of fate, I think it just means that everything will happen a certain way because of the way each molecule is positioned. I believe in this type of fate, not the type where someone else is controlling my actions. After all, who would control their actions then? Do they have a fate too? If not, why them? I think the scientific explanations with evidence make much more sense.
The French mathematician who publicized this idea, Laplace, used an hypothetical situation known as Laplace's demon, where a demon can process every atom in the universe and predict the future. An interesting twist on this that I thought about is if he can read every atom, and understand what all of his movements would cause, could he change the outcome of the future? If someone really could affect their destiny, it seems like this demon would be the one to do it. Yet even if he does seem to have the ability to affect the future and maybe decides to make himself rich, his decision to make himself rich was preset by all of the atoms in him. If we could go back to the big bang, and turn everything back into a few original atoms, and then run simulations from these, we would see a long string of events that leads exactly to where we are; no individual choices were made.
This is the opposite of the ideas seen in Oedipus. In Oedipus, the gods are able to control Oedipus's fate. No matter what he does to try to escape it, the gods can still ensure his fate happens how they want. Theoretically, if the gods knew ahead of time (through something like Laplace's demon) that Oedipus was going to kill his dad and sleep with his mom, it could be possible. Their telling Oedipus (through prophets) that it was his destiny to do so could have been part of what the Laplace's demon predicted and accounted for, so he would have known Oedipus would return to his birthplace. Although this is a viable possibility, the poem acts like the gods actually controlled the outcome instead of predicting it, so I still don't think the plot is completely viable.
These topics remind of three movies I've seen before: Final Destination, Run Lola Run, and The Butterfly Effect. Final Destination takes the stance of an invisible guiding hand. In it, fate is something that ensures everyone who is supposed to die does die, in the order they should. In Run Lola Run, the main character is able to control her own fate, by going through every possibility and changing her decisions to affect her fate until she reaches an ideal state. The Butterfly Effect has a similar idea where the main character can control his life by going back in time, but he has much less control. The time travel is simply used as a device to show how little he really can control. No matter how many times he goes back, he just continues to mess things up even more. He does not end up in an ideal state, but does settle on one where everyone is okay at least (sad ending still though). The Butterfly Effect and Run Lola Run mirrors my beliefs best because it shows how everything is just a long chain of events that cause each other.
The French mathematician who publicized this idea, Laplace, used an hypothetical situation known as Laplace's demon, where a demon can process every atom in the universe and predict the future. An interesting twist on this that I thought about is if he can read every atom, and understand what all of his movements would cause, could he change the outcome of the future? If someone really could affect their destiny, it seems like this demon would be the one to do it. Yet even if he does seem to have the ability to affect the future and maybe decides to make himself rich, his decision to make himself rich was preset by all of the atoms in him. If we could go back to the big bang, and turn everything back into a few original atoms, and then run simulations from these, we would see a long string of events that leads exactly to where we are; no individual choices were made.
This is the opposite of the ideas seen in Oedipus. In Oedipus, the gods are able to control Oedipus's fate. No matter what he does to try to escape it, the gods can still ensure his fate happens how they want. Theoretically, if the gods knew ahead of time (through something like Laplace's demon) that Oedipus was going to kill his dad and sleep with his mom, it could be possible. Their telling Oedipus (through prophets) that it was his destiny to do so could have been part of what the Laplace's demon predicted and accounted for, so he would have known Oedipus would return to his birthplace. Although this is a viable possibility, the poem acts like the gods actually controlled the outcome instead of predicting it, so I still don't think the plot is completely viable.
These topics remind of three movies I've seen before: Final Destination, Run Lola Run, and The Butterfly Effect. Final Destination takes the stance of an invisible guiding hand. In it, fate is something that ensures everyone who is supposed to die does die, in the order they should. In Run Lola Run, the main character is able to control her own fate, by going through every possibility and changing her decisions to affect her fate until she reaches an ideal state. The Butterfly Effect has a similar idea where the main character can control his life by going back in time, but he has much less control. The time travel is simply used as a device to show how little he really can control. No matter how many times he goes back, he just continues to mess things up even more. He does not end up in an ideal state, but does settle on one where everyone is okay at least (sad ending still though). The Butterfly Effect and Run Lola Run mirrors my beliefs best because it shows how everything is just a long chain of events that cause each other.
Monday, September 29, 2014
Brutality in United States Prisons
Roman poet Juvenal once asked, "Who will guard the guards themselves?" A variation on this might ask "Who will enforce the enforcers themselves?" In a prison, the inmates cannot be trusted since they are in the prison for committing a crime. The prison guards give the only trusted testimonies regarding what happens there. So what if they decide to break the law and lie about it? Well that is exactly what many prisoners claim is happening.
Jelpi Picou, an Orleans Parish Prisoner, said that there was a drug circle in the prison he served at. He claimed the guards sold drugs to the inmates. The problem with this is that nobody can report it; the people who are supposed to report it are the ones who are breaking the law. Another way the guards supposedly break the law is by beating the inmates. Estimates are that 85% of prison action is unsupervised. To me, this is insane because the prison is filled with people who need 24/7 supervision.
A very similar scenario unfolded in Bryce Courtenay's The Power Of One. Klipkop brutally beats up one of the black servants in the prison for a theft that he did not commit. You also see that Lieutenant Borman feels the same hatred towards prisoners, like when he boxes with Geel Piet, and kills him. As seen in real-life situations like this, you have to wonder whose job it is to report things like this. You would hope other guards would, but the corrupt ones typically seem to hold a lot of power, and can blackmail the innocent ones into keeping quiet. Prison guards obviously develop a lot of stress due to the nature of their job, but they're currently venting this stress by abusing their inmates. This is horrible because they might feel better after beating the inmate, but the stress will build back up shortly after, and they'll want to beat up another prisoner.
This is analogous to what happened in Ferguson recently. A criminal was shot and killed by a police officer, so the initial assumption is that the respected officer had a good reason to shoot. However, witnesses disagree about what actually happened. This is a tough situation because people expect that the officer is a good man, which, although true most of the time, can never be known for sure. Often it is the officer's word against that of either a criminal or a dead man. This current setup is not fair to the public citizens.
I think that these issues need to be resolved soon or riots like those seen in Ferguson will become more prevalent. The installment of cameras on police officers' bodies and cars could solve that issue, but the prison is a much larger area. They already have cameras, but the guards know how to not be seen on them. A possible solution to this could be having cameras directly on the guards. This way, whatever they looked at or heard, a judge can also look at or hear. I really feel like this would be the least possible necessary change to be made to the prison system.
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