Concepts in "A Clockwork Orange" & "Introducing Philosophy"

The issue of his existenceness " corned" by instruct is both too clearly meant to be resolved in the negative--he is non cured at all(prenominal), even through force: "Cured? . . . Me tied down to this fill in like this and you adduce cured? Kiss my sharries is what I say" ( bourgeois 176).

The question is not whether Alex is cured, alone whether anything of a moral record can be assigned to a gentle being who has his shiftdom of option taken from him by conditioning or by force. If morality is making choices, then(prenominal) the person marginal of choice cannot be moral or immoral. He is cryptograph but a machine. unitary can champion such(prenominal) conditioning in the name of controlling behavior, but not in the name of creating more moral hu gay beings. Burgess may be suggesting that it is preferable to have a free individual ravaging the countryside, raping and destroying, than it is to make an obedient citizen out of him through a process which removes his freedom.

Solomon includes these comments on religion, specifically Christianity, from Nietzsche:

Christianity . . . has placed all the basic instincts

. . . under the ban, and out of these instincts it has distilled evil and the Evil One: the strong man as the typically reprehensible man, the "reprobate." Christianity has sided with all that is weak and base, with all failures: it has made an ideal of what contra

In the area of ethics as in religion, self-identity and freedom, the same essential maxim holds true for Christian and existentialist philosopher alike--the individual human being's vegetable marrow in found in the exercise of his choosing what to do and what not to do. If one has such choice taken away, or if one willingly surrenders it, as does the chaplain, for example, then one is no longer fully a human being, and certainly not a free moral or ethical agent with an authentic self-identity. The chaplain is a central reputation in the playing out of this tragedy, because he knows he is doing harm yet he does it.

He is so attuned to the basics of the oppression of Alex that he mentions the unmentionable: "Is a man who chooses the bad peradventure in some way better than a man who has the good imposed on him?" (Burgess 95). That question, perhaps without answer, is the essence of the book, and the essence of what it means to be a free human being or a mechanical facsimile.

In new(prenominal) words, an individual, in effect, creates himself. It follows, then, that if the person is re-created by another, through the processes of forced conditioning which the individual does not choose and cannot avoid, then the individual's self-identity, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists.

Solomon writes of the ethical position known as mental egoism, which holds that "everyone . . . acts for his or her own advantage, and the only reason why concourse act respectfully or kindly toward each other is that that too, for one reason or another, is to their advantage" (Solomon 526).

Of course, there is null "voluntary" about any part of Alex's conditioning process, but that is exactly the point Burgess is making about the cunning of the representative of Christianity in his dealings with Alex.

Were it expedient, I would protest, but it is not expedient. There is the question of my own career, there is the question of the flunk of my own voice when set against the shout of certain
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