Ethics in Frankenstein and Brave New World
Ethics in "Frankenstein" and "Brave New World" For most of human history, the ethical considerations of scientific inquiry would have been a moot point. Outside of the Bible and mythology, there was no thought of creating life from inert matter because scientists would not have felt it was possible to do so. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, in the wake of landmark discoveries in the fields of chemistry, biology, and genetics, the possibility of scientific tampering with the human body and mind broached the ethical question of whether or not humankind would actually benefit, in the long run, from such a move. This dilemma is explored in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Mary Shelley wrote in a period when the "hard sciences" were still considered a branch of philosophy, but were rapidly developing into a discipline of their own, with new discoveries occurring at a rate that foreshadows the explosion of knowledge of our own day. Yet in Frankenstein Mary Shelley shows her concern that scientific exploration was exceeding its ethical boundaries; her novel is a blatant warning about the results of playing God, exemplified by the act of creating a human being without a woman.
To some extent Huxley's disillusionment with society is understandable; people of his time were very carried away with "scientific" theory and technological innovation. Science and technology should serve man, not the other way around, and ethics and morality should always present a higher priority than the on-going quest of scientific discovery. He also feared that people would become so content to have all their diseases cured and their problems eliminated that they would allow their basic freedoms eliminated as well. Mustapha Mond presents a number of strong arguments in favor of a happy population. Atomic power plants are regarded with grave caution. It is thus not terribly surprising that he agrees to create for the Being a bride; he clearly had this at least in the back of his mind all along. In 1932, when Aldous Huxley was writing Brave New World, the civilized world had boost in scientific and technological advances. Women might be shut out of politics, the sciences and to a large extent the arts (as in her day they were), but in Mary's view they could not be shut out of the procreation of the species. The torturous emotional rollercoasters such lifestyles involve! The students shudder; none of these dreadful concepts are even imaginable to them, and fortunately, Mond assures them, they need never know such traumas. Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed" . Mary was very cautionary about science, particularly in terms of the ethical ramifications of scientific experimentation. "Oh Frankenstein," the Being implores, "be not equitable to every other and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. In the midst of their tour, one of the ten World Controllers happens to drop into the Hatching and Conditioning Centre.
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