Cannibalism In The Road Ethic Analysis

According to psychological studies, the closer people get into death the stronger their instinct desires to be survival. And when human’s desire goes over extreme point, do they care about what wrong or right - their ethic – to behave as a human? The true answer has been remained mysterious for thousands years, however, the history shows that people behave differently in circumstances regarding to their belief system. That means the definition of good or bad ethic is neither absolute nor universal but in fact, it depends on their worldview. More specific, it depends on the civilization where they grow up, what ethic they inherit from their community, and how that community defines good ethic. This is the reason why, nowadays, people acts seem well in following the foundation of ethic through generations by generations, from one civilization to another. However, what if all civilizations and communities were destroyed, would the ethic be reverted to the dark age? Following the father and the boy’s journey in The Road, interestingly, readers could imagine how the practice of ethic is possibly altered in post-apocalyptic world. Struggling to live up with good ethic while keeping survival, they make a set of laws for being “good guys” and the most prevalent ones would be no …show more content…
The post-apocalyptic world has neither law enforcement nor resources for food. Most of the people are dead while a few remaining are starving and insanely compete for food. Extremely driven by their instinct for survival, a group of people becomes cannibals like animal. In this circumstance, there is a simple rule to preserve the principle of ethic. The bad guys eat people but the good guys don’t. Throughout the story, the protagonists consistently try to keep this moral principle to be “good guys” even though somehow they lose all faiths: “if he [the man] is not the word of God God never spoke” (McCarthy