A Lesson on Doing Right
I came across a fascinating article in City Journal on A Clockwork Orange by Andrew Burgess, which is better known in the US because of Stanley Kubrick's movie version of the novel.
I am not doing justice to the article in this post because I want to focus on one particular point that is contained in this exerpt:
The story, set in the England of the near future (the book was published in 1962), is simple. The narrator, Alex, a precocious 15-year-old psychopath who has no feeling for others, leads a small gang in many acts of gratuitous, and much enjoyed, violence. Eventually, caught after a murder, he goes to prison, where—after another murder—the authorities offer to release him if he submits to a form of aversive conditioning against violence called the Ludovico Method. On his release, however, he attempts suicide by jumping out of a window, receiving a head injury that undoes his conditioning against violence. Once more he becomes the leader of a gang. In the final chapter of the book’s British version, Alex again rejects violence, this time because he discovers within himself, spontaneously, a source of human tenderness that makes him want to settle down and have a baby. In the American edition—which Stanley Kubrick used—this last chapter is missing: Alex is not redeemed a second time, but returns, apparently once and for all, to the enjoyment of arbitrary and antisocial violence. In this instance, it is the British who were the optimists and the Americans the pessimists: Burgess’s American publisher, wanting the book to end unhappily, omitted the last chapter.My interest is in the final chapter of the British version of A Clockwork Orange. As the article notes: Alex again rejects violence, this time because he discovers within himself, spontaneously, a source of human tenderness that makes him want to settle down and have a baby. We're discussing Aristotle in the philosophy class that I teach. Aristotle's ethics is based on the assumption that everyone wants to have a happy life. Therefore, people will act in a way that allows them to have a happy life. That means avoiding excesses that could cause for an unhappy life. It's a simplistic concept, but the concept that doing right to achieve personal goals is an old one. Socrates and Plato had lofty views of morality. Actually, they thought that philosophers would act ethically because they understood large concepts like justice, truth and beauty and could therefore pursue The Good. It is interesting tracing the development of thought on what it means to "do right."
