Swift arranges the list of advantages of killing and eating the babies of the poor on the basis of utilitarianism. It is important, however, to note that while Swift wrote the essay, it does not express his point of view. It is the point of view of a clueless person who is so fixated on economics and utilitarianism that he has lost his moral compass; Swift wants us to be horrified by this person's ideas.
Since the narrator is chiefly concerned with economics—making the poor pay their own way—his first priority and first selling point is that his proposal can be described as,
[A] fair, cheap and easy method of making these children sound and useful members of the commonwealth.
He seems to lose sight of that fact that by making poor children sound and useful members of the commonwealth through killing them, he will also render them no longer members of the commonwealth.
He then moves onto his more "humanitarian" points, although they make no sense in the context of killing these babies: he argues that his scheme will prevent abortions and will give mothers an incentive not to murder their newborns. The mothers will instead wait until their babies are a year old to sell them for slaughter.
Swift wants us to see how inhumane and senseless it is to approach poverty and suffering only from an economic perspective without keeping in mind that those who suffer are also human beings.
Thursday, December 26, 2019
By what principle does Swift arrange his list of advantages in A Modest Proposal?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Why is the fact that the Americans are helping the Russians important?
In the late author Tom Clancy’s first novel, The Hunt for Red October, the assistance rendered to the Russians by the United States is impor...
-
There are a plethora of rules that Jonas and the other citizens must follow. Again, page numbers will vary given the edition of the book tha...
-
The poem contrasts the nighttime, imaginative world of a child with his daytime, prosaic world. In the first stanza, the child, on going to ...
-
The given two points of the exponential function are (2,24) and (3,144). To determine the exponential function y=ab^x plug-in the given x an...
-
The only example of simile in "The Lottery"—and a particularly weak one at that—is when Mrs. Hutchinson taps Mrs. Delacroix on the...
-
Hello! This expression is already a sum of two numbers, sin(32) and sin(54). Probably you want or express it as a product, or as an expressi...
-
Macbeth is reflecting on the Weird Sisters' prophecy and its astonishing accuracy. The witches were totally correct in predicting that M...
-
The play Duchess of Malfi is named after the character and real life historical tragic figure of Duchess of Malfi who was the regent of the ...
No comments:
Post a Comment