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I Love The Hunger Games Books

Do Moral Rules Apply In The Arena?

By: adm1825
Written on February 7th, 2013
Alright, so let me pose this question : do moral rules apply in the arena? If you think about it, it's somewhat of a philosophical quandary. If an authority figure is not only allowing you to kill each other, but mandating that you kill each other, then who is ethically responsible when the kids go at each other's throats?

It reminds me of the experiments that Stanley Milgram performed in the 1960s, in which he was able to get "teachers" to deliver dangerously high shocks to "learners," simply on the basis of a lab technician forcing them to continue.

Of course, no shocks were really being delivered, but two important questions were posed: who is morally responsible when an authority figure is forcing people to commit horrible acts? And what does it say about human nature when you can coax people into doing such terrible things?
By: adm1825
Age: 22-25 , Male
90 people have read this story

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    abstract189
    abstract189

    Do moral rules apply in the arena? I don't think so.



    It is a bit similar to the Milgram experiments, but the people in the experiment were not actually being forced to 'shock' the actors on the other side of the glass. They were simply just asked to shock them, and pretty much everyone knows scientists don't have the authority to compel people to do such a thing.



    What is different with the kids in the arena is, they are literally forced by penalty of death to participate in the game. If we agree that self defense is valid, then I think its fair to say what they are doing in the arena is self defense. If one of them raped or tortured another however, they would clearly be culpable as the hunger game rules do no require/force them to do so.



    To put it briefly, if someone puts a gun to your head and commands you to kill someone or be killed yourself, you are not morally culpable the other guy is. The government officials and agents who took part in the kidnapping of the kids and relocating them to the arena are responsible for all of the deaths.



    To put this in a real life context, we could compare the hunger game scenario to war. Is a soldier morally culpable for murder in war? If he is conscripted in to the army, and he is being forced on to the battlefield in a kill or be killed scenario, then its pretty much the same situation as the Hunger Games. But if its a volunteer army, or say he at least has the option to be a medic or engineer as opposed to a foot soldier, then I think he is morally culpable. He cannot use the excuse that authority figures like a general or the president told him to kill, and therefor its okay. The only thing that matters in determining his culpability is whether he is there on the battlefield voluntarily. Even if he changes his mind on the battlefield, and suddenly sees the enemy shooting at him, he can flee the other direction or surrender as opposed to kill.



    It is often the case that philosophers, and namely philosophy teachers, will use 'life boat' extreme scenarios to try and prove that moral rules are not valid because they can't be applied to these hypothetical extremes. I don't think 'lifeboat scenarios' are a useful tool for moral philosophy, for reasons I'm going to skip short of as I'm about to go to sleep. Not very philosophically rigorous of me. lol

    Feb 7
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