Ethics in Frankenstein and Brave New World essays

Ethics in Frankenstein and Brave New World essays 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. Mary was very cautionary about science, particularly in terms of the ethical ramifications of scientific experimentation. She granted that while scientists had granted man seemingly Promethean powers, they had not dealt with the moral and ethical responsibilities generated by these powers, as the Being himself points out. "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. 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" . This, Mary warns, is the true danger of the unimpeded rush toward scientific progress; th...