What does it mean to be good?\u00a0 How do we know what is right and wrong?\u00a0 Do we not steal because society, and law tell us this is bad, or is it more than that?\u00a0 What if that stealing accomplished something good, like saving a life?\u00a0 I am afraid that morals and ethics are not as black and white as I wish they were.<\/p>\n
Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em> by Harriet Beecher Stowe attacks the evil that is slavery.\u00a0 I can assume, with relative confidence, that you think slavery is evil as well.\u00a0 How is it that looking back we are able to condemn the practice, but in the mid 1800\u2019s this book needed to be written to convince the general population?\u00a0 Did people truly believe slavery was a viable practice that was morally acceptable?\u00a0 We can analyze the culture and blame societal acceptance, but people even used Scripture to defend slavery.\u00a0 So is something virtuous or depraved based on what we think in the moment?\u00a0 Is there an ultimate good, or is it all relative?<\/p>\n Stowe creates multifaceted characters that portray this dilemma of knowing with certainty what is right and what is wrong.\u00a0 Augustine St. Clare is a slave owner, but he takes good care of those he owns.\u00a0 He gives them fancy clothes and has never had them beaten because he believes it to be wrong.\u00a0 Should he be classified as a good person because he does right by his slaves, or does taking the freedom of other human beings negate his claim to goodness?\u00a0 Augustine is no Simon Legree who brutally whips any slave that dares to speak out of line, but he perpetuates the slaveholder industry.\u00a0 Legree takes pleasure in owning other humans and being a despicable tyrant, but Augustine knows the right thing to do would be to give his slaves their freedom, but he does not get around to it before he unexpectedly dies.\u00a0 Is it worse to do evil, or to not do the good you know you ought to have done?<\/p>\n Augustine\u2019s daughter is goodness personified in this novel.\u00a0 She is golden headed and beloved by all.\u00a0 She understands the slaves and empathizes with them.\u00a0 She feels the pain of a slave woman who was forced to let her baby die.\u00a0 She mourns with Topsy who has never had anyone to love her.\u00a0 Eva can do no wrong, and some cynics may attack her authenticity as a character for it.\u00a0 Topsy, on the other hand, can do nothing right without direct supervision.\u00a0 She steals from other people on the property and plays mean pranks.\u00a0 Her one liner is \u201cI\u2019s so wicked\u201d.\u00a0 She was raised to be a slave and no one ever loved her or took the time to teach her about morality.\u00a0 What is the ruling on her goodness as a person, i.e. is she just bad person even though no one has ever taught her what it means to be good?<\/p>\n Miss Ophelia is a northerner that believes slavery is wrong.\u00a0 Yet when Augustine brings her Topsy so that she can instruct her in the way that is right, she is repelled.\u00a0 She later admits that she did not ever even want to touch Topsy.\u00a0 After years of instructing Topsy, she takes Topsy back home with her, despite criticism from other northerners that are like she was, and gives Topsy her freedom.\u00a0 Topsy goes on to become a missionary.\u00a0 The one who had good principles encounters real life where those principles are put to the test, and the one who could not spell principle and thought she could do no good goes on to do exactly that.<\/p>\n George is Eliza\u2019s husband and a fugitive slave.\u00a0 He has violent tendencies and even shoots a man at one point.\u00a0 He must be a bad person.\u00a0 Would giving that incident context shift your perspective on how righteous or unrighteous he was?\u00a0 What if I told you he was protecting his wife and young son that were about to be captured as well?\u00a0 What if you knew that he had given the men ample warning and been shot at first?\u00a0 What if he stopped to care for the man afterwards?\u00a0 Do any of those aspects of the situation outweigh the malicious nature of using violence on another human?\u00a0 Uncle Tom is a devout Christian and refuses to use violence in any way.\u00a0 But Scripture also tells us to submit to authority.\u00a0 When Tom is under the ownership of Simon Legree he is ordered to whip another slave.\u00a0 Tom refuses and takes a beating for not following orders.\u00a0 Tom is much larger and stronger than Legree.\u00a0 Would the right thing have been to kill Legree and free all of his abused slaves?\u00a0 Or should he have followed directions and claimed the sin was Legrees’ sin and not his own because he was just following orders?<\/p>\n Axiology is not a study that is easily pinned down.\u00a0 There are numerous layers to the idea of ethics and knowing what is right and wrong.\u00a0 The same is true of people.\u00a0 Maybe no one is all good or all bad.\u00a0 Maybe we cannot quickly label situations, decisions, or people that way.\u00a0 Do not take that as me saying that morality is relative, however.\u00a0 The fact that all of these comparisons are possible means that there is an ultimate good that we are comparing it against.\u00a0 True, ultimate goodness is God.\u00a0 The difficulty then is in trying to be good, and make good choices, especially in complex situations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Julia Joyce What does it mean to be good?\u00a0 How do we know what is right and wrong?\u00a0 Do we not steal because society, and law tell us this is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":3812,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[340],"tags":[346],"class_list":["post-3811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-literary-studies","tag-american-literature","clearfix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3811"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3827,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3811\/revisions\/3827"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}