Ethical Systems Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Ethical Systems - Essay Example In the movie Sophie’s Choice, Sophie has to make a painful decision wherein she has to choose one of her two children to be sent to the gas chambers in order to save the other. The other option is to let go both the children with the guard to a certain death. Ethical formalism as brought out by Kant (Jensen, 1934), states that ‘Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’ In other words, an action irrespective of other circumstances and environment, is either right or wrong and can be applied universally at all points of time. Going by ethical formalism, in choosing for one of her children over the other, it is felt that Sophie has exercised her feelings and emotions rather than the universal law. The right choice for Sophie would have been to fight for the lives of both children even if it finally lead to the death of both the children. By deciding to send the girl away, she has wrecked havoc in the mi nds of both her children and herself. That she commits suicide at the end of it brings out this emotional struggle that she goes through. However, viewing Sophie’s Choice from an utilitarian perspective (Harpham, 1999), choosing rather than not choosing was the right thing to do. By choosing, irrespective of which child, she has potentially saved the life of at least one child. If she refused to choose and opted to struggle to keep both her children with her, the guard would have taken both of them away, presumably to the gas chambers. Therefore, from the utilitarian point of view, the lesser harm was in choosing one child over the other and Sophie did the right thing by doing so. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki resulted in the deaths of more than 100,000 civilians and an even greater number of casualties, cannot be easily justified regardless of the attack’s outcome (Alperovitch, 1995). As a result, controversy surrounds the use of atomic bombs against the Japanese cities of