Dec, 1, 2013
FD4
Making Moral Decisions
George Orwell and Claire McCarthy When an incident occurs, people would like to deal with it in the way they prefer. However, there always are some situations that force people to make decisions that are opposite to their own will since people live in society and they need to consider other's opinions. No matter if people realize or not, it is hard to make decisions totally in terms of if they like it or not, because there are many factors which need to take into consideration like moral and ethics and the effect exerted on whole society and other people’s opinion. Both George Orwell and Claire McCarthy faced the dilemma of making a choice between their feelings and other people’s thoughts. In Orwell’s article “Shooting an Elephant”, he describes a poor elephant that destroyed people’s homes and kills a man. The people in town wanted him, as sub-divisional police officer, to kill that elephant. Orwell in fact did not want to kill the elephant but he did because other people wanted him to do and pressured him to make that choice. Claire McCarthy met a similar problem in her article “Dog Lab”. She knew dog lab was an efficient way for students like her to learn knowledge but she was feeling terrible and uncomfortable with killing dogs even though there were some values to do so. People in society approve of dog lab as the way to learn and they have not yet found other methods to substitute it. However, McCarthy believed in terms of morals and ethics she cannot kill an innocent dog. These two authors have no choice because they have to shoulder their responsibility. Orwell killed the elephant because he represented those people who dominate Burma and he needed to satisfy the masses in order to behave like the people in charge. McCarthy killed a dog during the experiment because she needed to well prepared for future operation on her patients. Making a decision is never easy especially when