A Clockwork Orange 6

Here's the last forgotten blog post, luckily I remember things about this book so I don't have to replace it with something else or re-read it.

My memory of the details are a bit fuzzy, but I do remember the main moral issue was the experiment performed on the main character to make him incapable of doing bad things. A more accurate way of describing it would actually be that the treatment made him incapable of choosing to do bad things. It seems like this would be an ideal way to eliminate crime, but the result is less than pretty. When the main character starts getting beat up by a gang he finds himself unable to do anything but beg for forgiveness because he is incapable of choosing to fight back.

The moral issue here is if it's right to take away someone's ability to decide what to do, even if all they ever choose to do is commit crimes over and over. Is it morally correct to take people who compulsively commit crime and take away their ability to do anything negative? In theory doing so would benefit them as well as society, since instead of going to jail they would become a productive member of society and live a better life.

On the other hand, what about the problem with that theory, no matter how much you abuse someone who was changed like this they can never do anything about it. Is that fair to them, or a better question would be does it really help them?

My view is that to permanently take away someone's free-will, for any purpose, is wrong. The ability to choose what we do after evaluating our options is part of what makes us sentient, and our sentience is what makes us human instead of just another animal. So taking away free-will from a person is effectively the same as reducing them to something between animal and human. I don't believe we have the right to do that to someone, even if our intentions are good.

There might have been other things in this book that I could've blogged on, but I don't remember them, and this one issue was the theme of the whole story anyway, so anything else would just be a footnote. That said, my blog post for this book has reached its end.