Moral Standards In Lord Of The Flies

In the novel, Lord of the Flies, written by William Golding, he makes the claim to the idea that humans have two desires; to live peacefully following moral standards and live for yourself and lose all boundaries of standards. He gives us characters, Ralph and Jack, in the novel that demonstrate these ideas of desires. He also displays, what might be the outcome when the environment that we are surrounded by, suddenly becomes a survival situation. Although I agree with Golding when he claims that humans do want to live peacefully and follow moral standards and live for yourself and lose all boundaries of standards, I do find that our environment is a factor that cannot be underestimated. When we are raised with certain standards of living, we can only be sure that they have become our standards after they have been challenged. Then, and only then, will we be able to see if we are in fact, embracing what has been taught to us, and if those standards have actually become a part of us. Without challenging our standards, with the circumstances …show more content…
According to the book, Opening Skinner’s box, Slater brings the point out about social cuing, the bystander effect. She discusses her own experience of going to a church, across the street from her from her home. She would see the collection basket go around after the sermon, and after attending several times, she noticed that before the basket would get to the first person, it would already have money in it. She happened to be talking to her sister, that was a bartender, and she told Slater that she would, what she called “salt” her tip cup with her own money. Her sister told her that she would get more tips that way, because of the thought that others had given tips so they would proceed to do the same (105). This shows that we can make choices just because of the suggestion that someone else has done it