Literature in general always makes a great contribution to all fields of people’s life. It is very important to understand literature as one of the sources of impact on the human consciousness. In order to achieve this aim, people should be taught how to understand literature and to take only the most useful and effective things from it.
The book The Moral of the Story is a good example of an educational book. It is much useful for understanding ethics and morality. The author of the book uses different examples in the stories. These examples help to understand the plot and sense of the stories. The author uses different examples from everyday life and from films and modern literary works.
The first chapter of the first part of the book, which is called The Story as a Tool of Ethics, contains the general issues about ethics and morality. The stories help to understand what is good and what is bad for people. It is a fact for many people it is the most difficult question in their lives, and that is why it should be properly answered in this book.
The second chapter of the book is devoted to learning moral lessons from the stories. So, here the author explains why the stories are important.
And that is really the task of the book to educate and to bring more moral and ethical things to people who need this.
As was mentioned above, the author uses different illustrations and uses the primary reading from different kinds of literary pieces to enrich the students’ world with examples from ancient and modern culture.
The second part is devoted to different philosophical and global problems. The third chapter is called Ethical Relativism and contains the following stories: How to Deal with Moral Differences, The Lessons of Anthropology, Problems with Ethical Relativism, Refuting Ethical Relativism, Ethical Relativism, and Multiculturalism, Primary Reading: Ruth Benedict, “Anthropology and the Abnormal,” Primary Reading: Dwight Furrow, “Of Cave Dwellers and Spirits,”
Primary Reading: Bhikhu Parekh, “The Concept of Multicultural Education,” Narrative: The Poisonwood Bible, Narrative: Possessing the Secret of Joy, Narrative: Sideshow, Narrative: Do the Right Thing.
The fourth charter has the greatest value for morality and ethics. It is devoted to psychological egoism. Ethical egoism contrasts with ethical altruism, which holds that moral agents have an ethical obligation to help or serve others. Ethical egoism does not, however, require moral agents to disregard the well-being of others, nor does it require that a moral agent refrains from considering the well-being of others in moral deliberation. What is in an agent’s self-interest may be incidentally detrimental to, beneficial to, or neutral in its effect on others. It allows for the possibility of either as long as what is chosen is efficacious in satisfying the self-interest of the agent.
Ethical egoism is sometimes the philosophical basis for people’s support of libertarianism or anarchism, political positions based partly on a belief that individuals should not coercively prevent others from exercising freedom of action.
In conclusion, it is worth saying that every chapter of the book is different because of its originality and importance for the whole book. The use of different and various examples makes the book colorful and appropriate for our epoch.
Any ethical doctrine on the value orientation can be moral; in it can be declared any extra moral values, including the contradicting moral standards. Certainly, already antique thinkers, as appears from the texts, noticed a special position of those values which we now name “moral,” among other valuable installations; however, this special status was not conceptual and is terminologically issued, the borders between actually moral and other values were easily broken.
Therefore the valuable spectrum of the ethical doctrines always was much richer and various, rather than the valid divergences of philosophers in their moral positions (especially if to mean divergences not in concrete moral estimations and norms, and in treatment of the general principles of morals). They are kept in the modern language and a science excessive substantial affinity of concepts “ethics” and the “morals” show, in particular, that “ethics” are almost always defined through “morals,” lead, on the one hand, to unjustified narrowing of a subject of ethics, and with another – to such an unjustified widening treatment of the morals.
Works cited
“The moral of the Story”, ed. Nina Rosenstand (New York: Mcgraw-hill, fifth edition, 2006).