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Ethics And Morals Of Pi

Decent Essays
Mace 1
Megan Mace
G. Cameron
ENG 4U
December 19, 2016
Ethics and Morals in Life of Pi
Everybody; no matter your religion, skin colour, or gender possess a combination of morals based on the things internally believed are right or wrong. These can be established through many influences including, social constructs, personal experiences, and upbringing. Yann Martel is constantly challenging the reader’s morals throughout Life of Pi, after Pi is on the lifeboat, he has to make the extremely hard decision between his own religious morals, and survival. In all of Pi’s dilemmas, survival always outweighs the “needs” of mankind 's culture, making these constructs no longer a priority. Utilitarianism, consequential versus categorical moral
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You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality.” (Martel 336) Pi sees that the needs of a majority take precedence over the things that he went through --which could be reasonably contended-- so Pi tells them the story everyone would believe in the means to benefit society. Over many of years, the concept of utilitarianism has changed, people would once describe it as pain and pleasure. Now society begins to further the approach, thinking about the intensity and duration of pain and pleasure. To this day there are seven principles that should be considered while thinking about what true pain and pleasure are. Some including, intensity, duration, and propinquity or remoteness. Intensity, being one of the most important of all, can determine whether or not it is pain or pleasure, revealing a high degree of emotional excitement. The length of time something continues or exists, is known a duration. Propinquity or remoteness is the thinking of how close something is either in a time or location sense, as in when or where it is about to happen. These are all great morals to have, when it’s thought of in a utilitarian sense, it should be applied to a majority for it’s still the idea of equality.

Mace 3
The basis of utilitarianism is consequentialist moral reasoning, which locates morality from the consequences of the act. Once again to base morality off the idea of making a
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