Flowers For Algernon Is Unethical

Dupuy Kenzie Chang English Period 2
OPTION 2 WRITING ASSIGNMENT

Animal and human testing is widely known to be used for aiding scientific experiments very often. People either despise it or believe it’s necessary and useful. The story Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes is about a man named Charlie Gordon who gets a surgery and ends up becoming temporarily smart. Was performing an experiment on Charlie Gordon ethical? Some might say that it isn’t ethical. Charlie didn’t even know what he was getting himself into. Others will say that the surgery is ethical. However, it is ethical to perform an experiment on him. Performing surgery on Charlie is ethical because first of all Charlie volunteered, next, it was for a good cause,

That could be true; the scientists probably could have waited until Algernon died to be sure of their results. An example of when happens is when Charlie is gets shunned by his colleagues. Fanny one of his colleagues said, “Them changes. I don’t know. You used to be a good, dependable, ordinary--not too bright maybe, but honest... Like everybody around here’s been saying, Charlie, it’s not right ”(pg 11). This means that everyone around him notices the changes that he has gone through. The importance of this is that nobody likes the changes he has been going through. It’s even gotten to the point where he isn’t even liked anymore. This could have been easily prevented if they just waited for Algernon’s results; the surgery could have easily been tweaked to prevent Charlie from becoming an outcast and dying. While some might argue and say that the surgery was an unethical option because it made him an outcast and he wouldn’t have died if the scientist had waited. This is not true because they had every right to believe that Charlie wouldn’t have died because they did many tests because Algernon was the only one of his kind who was successful. In addition, they were not the only test subjects being used. There would be no reason to think that Algernon would die because he was considered a success. In progress report 13 Charlie states, “In a way we’re both the first of our kind. They’re all pretending that Algernon’s behavior is not necessarily significant for me”(pg 14). This means that the scientists didn’t consider that what happened to Algernon would probably happen to Charlie. This shows that they really didn’t know what was going to happen. This also further proves the fact that the scientists probably thought his results were going to be different. They probably thought that since his results were pretty successful, that maybe he wouldn’t have the same outcome as Algernon. Another example of a