The Kite Runner
Is it true, that we have to fulfill our ultimate duty and redeem the evils we made, no matter how difficult it is and how long we try to postpone it?
Or is it just a fantasy based on an ethical metaphor? Is it true, that our past mistakes and faults are going to follow and haunt us throughout our lives? How would one feel at the end of one's life knowing that some things still need redemption?
If this very thought would even cross our minds, considering our capacity to deceive ourselves, explaining our wrongdoings as the necessary evils and our weaknesses and cowardice as rationality and common sense.
Or most likely we would just forget the things that are too unpleasant to remember. This is what would happen most likely. I think for many of us life will provide the layer of insulation protecting us from facing the truth. But the book has a moral point, though a fairy tale kind.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Do empathy and emotions define the higher level of human being? And the lack of emotions or empathy puts us in a category of lower human beings. Putting aside robots.
For example, if we decided to divide the society into groups with the different social status and privileges based on the level of empathy and emotions, e.g., emotional intelligence would it be fair?
Do the emotions and empathy have any value per se, not being reaffirmed by action? And does it matter when the action is impossible?
And if they matter so much that we deem any AI as totally alien, because it's incapable of emotions, then how this correlates with the philosophy of individualism?
At this point, the Pandora's box of multiple ethical questions is opened, so I leave it at that
Never Let Me Go
I wonder if this hypothetical social experiment can be justified from the point of view of ethics. Setting aside the platitudes about equal rights and opportunities for all human or humanlike beings.
Throughout history, we had the principle of duty more frequently defining human fates than the idea of free will. Indian caste system, the principle of Dharma, responsibilities of Warrior, Governor and Martyr.
Can the concept of human donors in the background of this story be accepted as morally justified martyrdom for the well-being of society in general?
What's essentially wrong with the idea of people with a preordained duty attached to their lives? And how are they different from the people for whom the duties are imposed by their ethics?
Another question, can the society decide the matters of ethics and their implications in a form of duties for its members or is it important to allow each person to make a decision about the system of values they want to follow. In general, is there something wrong with the events in this story?
Brave New World
One of the ideas in the book that captured my attention: Would it be justified, if our conventional notions of attachment and relations are deemed harmful and discarded in order to give everyone an opportunity to lead more enjoyable and fulfilling life?
On the one hand, those principles had been developed so we would be able to survive as a species. On the other hand, if it's not an issue, does it make sense to keep them? How would it really affect people psychologically if it was a real situation?
Also why we consider discarding the feeling of attachment unethical? Is it simply due to the tradition or instinct or there is some deeper meaning in this?
Also, the second question: is it ethical to artificially limit mental capabilities of people who are predestined to have a lower status and perform menial jobs? Wouldn't it reduce their unquenchable craving for better opportunities, social angst, a feeling of being unworthy, and self-depreciation?
Does the society that artificially divides people into castes, where everybody has their paths laid out for them in advance, makes its members happier because nobody feels that their low status is their own fault?
1984
If the industrial economies in this scenario use all their surpluses to sustain wars, that are artificially maintained to keep this economic model functioning, what's wrong with the industrial economies?
Is it some artificial and erroneous route of civilization? Because in reality, producers spend a significant part of their revenues on marketing campaigns trying to convince people to buy stuff that they otherwise wouldn't buy.
So basically the industrial economies produce a lot of unnecessary stuff. Also, does this kind of society provides maybe an essential thing - the existential meaning, expressed in this scenario as an eternal fight with quite an abstract and symbolic enemy?
This Perfect Day
What is more important; a stable and perfectly organized society that keeps its members satisfied and relatively happy by regulating and suppressing their impulses and passions with drugs? Or is it freedom of people's emotions, passions, and creative impulses even when they are dangerous and destructive?
Do such impulses and passions even dark and destructive have some value per se that can outweigh the stability of the society and its members? Is this social control through drugs similar to the control through the religion and conventional morals?