Committing suicide, abortion and school violence- these are just a few headachy problems that school along with society are currently dealing with. However, the question here is: “Are they morally correct? ” Being at the age of a high school student and working in the student council, I already have and will surely further have difficulty involving with this challenging question. I was always curious and interested in the difference between ethics and morals. When I was making decision, there had been several aspects and sources helping me to figure out why I did that, it sometimes was from my family, or religion, even situation.
In my opinion, I believe that I don’t really make moral decision and form values within a culture that affects me as well as formed system of thinking that I have developed for years. As the book, “Moral of the Story”, explains the origin and the arising question of what is moral, committing suicide is one of the issues that I have already faced. Through secondary and now high school, I usually was told and read about the phenomenon of students themselves dying recklessly.
When I was at 11th grade, I saw a boy jumping out from the fourth floor, because of the pressure of study that his parents expected from him. It saddens me to think that one could possibly want to choose death over life and I still don’t quite understand it. For me, it is a foolish and moral action. The shortest definition I’ve heard, is that morals are how you treat people you know and ethics are how you treat people you don’t know. So who is the one knowing best about you but yourself ? Morals define personal character, while ethics stress a social system in which those morals are applied.
In my country, studying extra classes is somehow an unquestionable thing to do. The way we merely learnt daily from school couldn’t meet the demands of teachers and capability to deal with the graduated tests and entrance tests to universities. It then becomes a big trend when parents long for their children to enter a “good” and “acceptable” college without knowing whether it is suitable for them or not. Due to those expectations, students force themselves to work harder with a hope to achieve what they wanted but not everyone can stand against the pressure.
There are many parents getting mad at school which student council is a part of because of what happened to their children. Personally, all I can do is to pray that god has made his plan for them, I really don’t want to hold responsibility for the death of students. Another issue in student council that I may encounter is abortion. Working in the student council, it is not seldom that we have to deal with couples of students making love secretly at school and receive the same answer when they were asked for the solution if the girl got pregnant.
People argue whether it is morally right to take a life in case of rape, lack of knowledge, or if the mother cannot take care of the baby and even doesn’t want it. Even though it is legal to abort, I still believe that it is morally wrong. It is evil. According to chapter 1 in the book “The moral of story”, evil is the self serving choice that individuals make freely, even when they know full well the moral law they should be following or to say briefly, it is just a matter of selfishness and pride. A life is still a life, whatever the condition and situation is.
It will be a lie to say that parents are unable to take care of the baby. Is it true that we can not do that but we choose not to ? Being eighteen years old as a student who is still feeling strange with the way life goes, I still hope that I don’t ever face that situation and that stolid answer from any others. My wish is that god will bless and show them the light and the truth. In reviewing my personal ethics, the fact that students fight and bully each other upsets me. Kids at the pubertal ages like me have something developed in the mind and their actions.
They began to realize the negative aspects of the society and the reality isn’t like in their dreams. At that time, questioning and struggling are unavoidable. They question themselves if it was right or wrong or what is the right way to live ? It is easy for us to judge others’ action but confronting and judging ourselves are a really difficult task. Students then are influenced by negative things which later makes their character change. There are some arguments for the things happening due to racism, family, environment, social status.
However, we still need to mention about the sinful nature of human. The bad things happening nowadays are just nourishment for the nature to grow more negatively. Besides selfishness, humans desires power and want to rule. Time still goes but there will be nothing change if we don’t deal with the root of the problems. What can students gain when they fight and violate their friends ? Is it just a matter of having fun when seeing others suffering? In my point of view, I do believe that if we have courage to face with the problems, we can deal and succeed completely.
The choices are ours to decide, we do often have stronger motivation for decision making, however, should we consider the right and wrong aspect first before deciding what we are going to do ? Committing suicide, abortion and school violence are just some of the issues that will challenge me with morally in my student life . Nevertheless, I do not find these issues to be morally correct, I am sure that I may have to under make decisions that conflict with my moral status and these will not influence my ethical perspective.
