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Morality And Sympathy In Jonathan Bennett's The Ethical Life

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In the text, The Ethical Life, by Russ Shafer-Landau, it questions Jonathan Bennett’s morality and sympathy and how the two of them can come into conflict. Morality and sympathy are connected, but still very different. Throughout this chapter, Jonathan Bennett outlines many important points and factors that go into these connections and how they can overlap and conflict. Jonathan Bennett says morality can be “bad1.” This type of morality is one that Bennett strongly disagrees with, no so much that one’s morality is actually proven to be bad or even untrue. Sympathy is different than morality in a myriad of ways. In the text, Bennett uses the term sympathy as an umbrella of feelings covering “feeling pity over someone’s loneliness, or horrified …show more content…

An explanation given in the text is how sympathy and morality will align. When there is a conflict, one side will usually be both sympathy and morality while the other side could be fear of punishment or the anticipation or expectation of a reward. A famous exception to this would be the character Huck in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Now only was he not taught proper morals, but he also grew up in an area and time period where slavery was acceptable. Owning a slave then could be the equivalent of owning a car, something that is not morally wrong. So, when Huck picks up Jim, a recently escaped slave, and heads up the Mississippi River, he gets nervous when Jim begins to talk about how he will soon be free and plans to buy, or even steal, his wife and children. This was during a time where Huck would be committing a crime by helping a slave escape. He has a difficult time deciding to be loyal to his friend and let Jim continue up the rest of the way up north so that he can be freed, or to turn Jim in as an escaped slave. Huck fears getting in trouble, but he also is very torn because of the relationship that he now has with Jim. Huck’s askew sense of sympathy and morality are conflicting each other. He sympathizes with Jim, but believes that turning him in is the right thing to do. This moral decision is not in line with his

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Huck has a moral crisis when he thinks, “Well, I can tell you it made me all over trembly and feverish, too, to hear him, because I begun to get it through my head that he WAS most free—and who was to blame for it?” and because of the effect Jim has on his and the lessons he’s taught, Huck realizes that helping him

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Huck sees Jim as just property and an ignorant slave who is below him. He does not really care about him very much, but we see that he cares enough to risk helping a black man get to the free states. We see Huck play a trick on Jim when he puts a snake next to Jim when he is sleeping and scaring him half to death when Jim woke up.. Huck just sits there and laughs at Jim. This is the typical 14 year old who loves to play tricks on the adults.

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This leads into the main internal conflict that Huck must face. He must chose whether to break federal law by running away with Jim, a slave, or to do what society believes what is right and return him back to his owner. In the end, Huck chooses to not turn Jim in and go on a journey with him, defying the laws of the country. Johnson says that this recommends disobedience and defiance on the part of young people, however it does the opposite. This shows that Huck’s moral values are more in tune with making the right choice than society’s.

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