After reading the assignments in module 2, imagine you are in the same situations as one of the fiction characters and real people. What moral decisions would you have made and why? How would emotions and the situational context have played a role? The readings are the files below
Instructions:
Support your response by providing either:
o A deep and reflective justification defending your moral stance on a particular
ethical issue. Using the ethical and moral theories learned from the reading
assignments and quotations to defend your position is good way to justify your
position
o Reflections and critical examinations of relevant personal experience where
moral decisions have been made and that support your position
3. Give informed opinions on a moral or social issue that are supported by clear and
cogent arguments
4. All posts must be well organized and having cogent arguments justifying your position
5. Use proper netiquette (proper language, typing, grammar, spelling and punctuation)
6. Use MLA guidelines for all in-text citations and reference pages
7. All of your posts will be read by the professor onlyThe Conscience of Huckleberry Finn
Author(s): Jonathan Bennett
Source: Philosophy , Apr., 1974, Vol. 49, No. 188 (Apr., 1974), pp. 123-134
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Royal Institute of Philosophy
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3750031
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The Conscience of Huckleberry
Finn
Jonathan Bennett
In this paper, I shall present not just the conscience of Huckleberry Finn
but two others as well. One of them is the conscience of Heinrich Himmler.
He became a Nazi in I923; he served drably and quietly, but well, and was
rewarded with increasing responsibility and power. At the peak of his
career he held many offices and commands, of which the most powerful
was that of leader of the S.S.-the principal police force of the Nazi regime.
In this capacity, Himmler commanded the whole concentration-camp
system, and was responsible for the execution of the so-called ‘final
solution of the Jewish problem’. It is important for my purposes that this
piece of social engineering should be thought of not abstractly but in
concrete terms of Jewish families being marched to what they think are
bath-houses, to the accompaniment of loud-speaker renditions of extracts
from The Merry Widow and Tales of Hoffman, there to be choked to death
by poisonous gases. Altogether, Himmler succeeded in murdering about
four and a half million of them, as well as several million gentiles, mainly
Poles and Russians.
The other conscience to be discussed is that of the Calvinist theologian
and philosopher Jonathan Edwards. He lived in the first half of the eighteenth
century, and has a good claim to be considered America’s first serious and
considerable philosophical thinker. He was for many years a widely-
renowned preacher and Congregationalist minister in New England; in
I748 a dispute with his congregation led him to resign (he couldn’t accept
their view that unbelievers should be admitted to the Lord’s Supper in
the hope that it would convert them); for some years after that he worked
as a missionary, preaching to Indians through an interpreter; then in 1758
he accepted the presidency of what is now Princeton University, and within
two monMayfield Publishing Company, California 1999. Alexander E. Hooke (Virtous Persons, Vicious Deeds)
These materials are made available at this site for the educational purposes of students enrolled at Anne Arundel Community College.
They may be protected by U.S. Copyright law and should not be reproduced or transmitted electronically. One photocopy or printout
may be made of each article for personal, educational use.
his fiction might shape the way we get along with the children weye tutoring-
affect our attitudes toward them, the things we say and do with them.
Yet I wonder whether classroom discussion, per se, can’t also be of help, the
skepticism of my student notwithstanding. She had ~ u s h e d me hard, and I started ‘ referring again and again in my classes on moral introspection ta what she had
observed and learned, and my studenrs more than got the message. Her moral
‘ righteousness, her shrewd eye and ear for hypocrisy hovered over us, made us un-
easy, goaded us.
She challenged us to prove that what we think intellectually can be connected
to o u r daily deeds. For some of us, the connection was established rhrough corn-
munity service. But that is not the only possible way, 1 asked students to write
papers chat told of particular efforts to honor through action the high thoughts we
were discussing. Thus goaded ta a certain self-consciousness, I suppose, students
made various efforts. I felt that the best of them were small victories, brief epiphan-
ies that might otherwise have been overlooked, bu t had great significance for the
students in question.
“I thanked someone serving me food in the college cafeteria, and then we got to
talking, the first time,” one student wrote. For her, this was a decisive break with
her former indifference to others she abstractly regarded as “the people who work
on the serving line.” She felt that she had learned something about another’s life
and had tried to show respect for rhat life.
The student who challenged me with her angry, melancholy story had pushed
me to teach different!^. Now, I make an explicit issue of the more than occasional
disparity between thinking and doing, and I ask my students to consider how we
ali might bridge that disparity. To be sure, the task of connecting intellect to char-
acter is daunting, as Emerson and others well knew, And any of us can lapse into
cynicism, turn the moral challenge of a seminar into yet another moment of op-
portunism: I’ll get an A this time, by writing a paper cannily extolling myself as a
doer of this or that “good deed”!
Still, I know that collcge administrators and faculry members everywhere are
struggling with the same issues that I was faced with, and I can testify that many
studcnts will respond seriously, in at least small ways, if we make clear that we
really believe that the [ink between moral reasoning and action is important to us.
My experience has given me at least a measure of hope thaThese materials are made available at this site for the educational purposes of students enrolled at Anne Arundel Community College.
They may be protected by U.S. Copyright law and should not be reproduced or transmitted electronically. One photocopy or printout
may be made of each article for personal, educational use.
small, but the circIe of lights is smaller. The u~loadillg will have to b,
done gradually. Somewhere the trucks ale growling. They back up against the
steps, black, ghostlike, their searchlights flash across the trees. Wasser! [email protected]! ~ h ,
same all over again, like a latt showing of the same film; a volley o f $hob
rhe train hlls silent. Only this time a litrle girl pushes hcrsdf Mfway through
., : the small window and, losing her balance, falls out on to rhe gravel. Stunned,
she Lies still for a moment, then stand5 up m d bqins w&ng around in a c idq
fwter and Faster, waving her rigid arms in che air, breathing I o d y and spasmod
ically, whining in a faint voice. Her mind has grven way in che inferno inside,t]le
trai~~. The whinmg is hard on the nerves: an S.S. man approaches calmly, his
heavy boot s d e s between her shou2dtrs. She falls. 1-Ioldtng her down mth I&
foot, he draws hr. revolver, fms once, then again. She remains face down, hchng
the gravel wich her feet, until she stiffens. They proceed to unseal the train. ,
I am back an the ramp, standrng by the doors. A warm, sickening smeU ‘,
gushes from inside. The mountain of people filling rhe car almost halfway up
to the ceiling is motionless, horribly tangled, but still steaming,
‘ ~ ~ ~ ~ n ! ” ” comes the command. An S.S. man steps out from the darkness.
Across his chest hangs aportable searchhght. We throws a stream of light inside.
“Why are you standing about like sheep? Seart unloading!” His whip flies
and falls across our backs. I seize a corpse by rhe hand; the fingers close rightly ‘
around mine. I pull back with a shriek and stagger away, My heart pounds, ‘
jumps up to my thraar. I can no longer control the nausea. Hunched under che
main I b e ~ n to vomit. Then, like a drunk, I weave over to the stack of tails.
1 lie against the cool, kind metal and dream about returning to the camp,
about my bunk, on which there is no mattress, about sleep among comrades
who are not going to the gas tonight. Suddellly I see the camp as a haven of
peace. I t is true, others may be dylng, but one is somehow stilI alive, one has ”
enough food, enough strength to work. . . .
The lights on the ramp flicker with a spectral glow> the wave of people- lso
feverish, agitated, stupefied people-flows on and on, endlessly. They &ink that
now they will have ta face a new life in che camp, and they prepare rhemselves
emotionally for the hard struggle ahead They do not know that in just a few mo-
ments they will die, tlm the gold, moneyJ and diamonds which they have so pru. -,
deently hidden in their dothrng and on their bo9/30/2020 Thirty-Eight_Murder.htm: PHL1422002020FA
https://aacc.instructure.com/courses/118314/files/9378899?fd_cookie_set=1 1/3
Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police
New York Times
Martin Gansberg
March 27, 1964
For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a
woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.
Twice their chatter and the sudden glow of their bedroom lights interrupted him and frightened him off. Each
time he returned, sought her out, and stabbed her again. Not one person telephoned the police during the assault;
one witness called after the woman was dead.
That was two weeks ago today.
Still shocked is Assistant Chief Inspector Frederick M. Lussen, in charge of the borough’s detectives and a
veteran of 25 years of homicide investigations. He can give a matter-of-fact recitation on many murders. But the
Kew Gardens slaying baffles him–not because it is a murder, but because the “good people” failed to call the
police.
“As we have reconstructed the crime,” he said, “the assailant had three chances to kill this woman during a 35-
minute period. He returned twice to complete the job. If we had been called when he first attacked, the woman
might not be dead now.”
This is what the police say happened at 3:20 A.M. in the staid, middle-class, tree-lined Austin Street area:
Twenty-eight-year-old Catherine Genovese, who was called Kitty by almost everyone in the neighborhood,
was returning home from her job as manager of a bar in Hollis. She parked her red Fiat in a lot adjacent to the
Kew Gardens Long Island Railroad Station, facing Mowbray Place. Like many residents of the neighborhood,
she had parked there day after day since her arrival from Connecticut a year ago, although the railroad frowns
on the practice.
She turned off the lights of her car, locked the door, and started to walk the 100 feet to the entrance of her
apartment at 82-70 Austin Street, which is in a Tudor building, with stores in the first floor and apartments on
the second.
The entrance to the apartment is in the rear of the building because the front is rented to retail stores. At night
the quiet
neigborhood is shrouded in the slumbering darkness that marks most residential areas.
Miss Genovese noticed a man at the far end of the lot, near a seven-story apartment house at 82-40 Austin
Street. She halted. Then, nervously, she headed up Austin Street toward Lefferts Boulevard, where there is a
call box to the 102nd Police Precinct in nearby Richmond Hill.
She got as far as a street light in front of a bookstore before the man grabbed her. She screamed. Lights went
on in the 10-story apartment house at 82-67 Austin Street, which faces the bookstore. Windows slid open and
voices punctuated the early-morning stillness.
Miss Genovese screamed: “Oh, my God, he stabbed me! Please help me! Please help me!”
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