My Metacognition

Gatsby Ethics Metacognition

My artifact is a website explaining/documenting various ethical and moral standpoints of characters within The Great Gatsby. Ethics is a very complex idea with both subjective and objective based elements. The reason we care about ethics in any situation is because it provides a moral compass for people to act on and to have a basis for. This can come in the form of fairness, justice, dignity, encouragement, and much more. In The Great Gatsby, understanding ethics can be very benficial to actually understanding how the characters operate on a more advanced level.

In The Great Gatsby, it is evident that there is an abundance of moral and ethical decay shown from majority of the main characters. Comparing this book to reality, it's not that far off from what could happen in real life. Wealth and money tends to corrupt those with a weak moral compass. Take Vladimir Putin for example, a highly corrupt world leader and politican. Due to Putin's high self interest, he has sacrificed the integrity of his country for his personal benefit through bribes and diverting funds and effectively demonstrating his almost nonexistent morals. In The Great Gatsby, the same moral and ethical decay is present through a variety of characters.

In my opinion, the man who scores lowest on the Kohlberg's scale within the book is Tom Buchanan. Tom is a liar and an abuser. Hitting people to gain control over a situation shows little to no ethical or moral compass. A scene in the book describes Tom hitting Myrtle, "Making a short, deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand" (41). Already we can see somewhat early on in the book that Tom is objectively a bad person referencing the Kohlberg's scale. Using physical violence to dismiss or gain control of a situation is immoral and unethical. He also lies to people. Lying is not ethical as it ruins trust and also opens a window for deliberate manipulation and corrupts your principles of honesty. Tom says "“I told him the truth,” he said. “He came to the door while we were talking, and I told him"" (190). In the context of this situation, Tom twists the truth to Nick Carraway because he is scared for his own life. Not only is he lying, but he is lying for the benefit of himself, which is immoral. Time and time again does Tom prove himself to be a very unethical character within The Great Gatsby.

On the other hand, a character seen as morally just and ethical is Nick Carraway. Throughout the story Nick demonstrates his internal moral prinicples and places himself high on the Kohlberg's scale. He transcends everyone else in the story by being reasonable, seeing through the wealth corruption, and having his own set of "red flags" in a sense. Nick says "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made". Nick sets an example for the people reading the book. He is clearly a reasonable person and making him a righteous individual throughout the story.

I also wanted to talk about my artifact in a way that doesn't relate to The Great Gatsby. I chose to make a website to display the ethics on book characters because in my personal opinion makes the topic feel more defined or professional. I could have just created a Google slideshow, but I wanted the topic of ethics to strike others as something that should be taken seriously. There are many unethical practices that take place in society and I think that most people don't realize this. For me, I think that the the "it's okay because other people do it" statement is very true and many people use that to justify immoral actions. Another reason I think that analyzing the ethical principles of book characters is important is that it allows you to see the flaws in fictional characters that have no impact on the world and comparing them to others that may be corrupted from lust, greed, power. And this could allow you to see the flaws in yourself as well, and to possibly update your own moral compass and become more interested in how ethics affect society.