Thoughts on Defining Moral Lines in the Sciences in Shelly’s Frankenstein and the World Today

Today’s blog post will focus on Mary Shelly’s Frankenstien and some thoughts on defining moral lines within the sciences in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and the World Today.

    We will argue here that Victor and today’s society share a love for rationality and science, but also that they tend to blur the line between rationality and madness. In the beginning of the novel the reader sees that Victor commits himself to his studies. While he begins studying philosophy he ends up in field in the physical sciences due to his desire to base his studies in facts rather than philosophy. He also shows a desire to come to a level of academic mastery of multiple subjects in order to support his knowledge in science. In this way Victor relates closely to today’s society which seems to engage heavily in research and the sciences and has recently seemed to take a turn toward having a strong preference for science and mathematics over the arts. Another similarity that Victor shares with modern day society seems to be his desire for friendship. This desire for human connection shows rationality both mentally and emotionally, however it can be easily argued that creating a companion is too extreme and falls into the category of madness.

    Victor and today’s society also both attempt to find and define the line between science and morality. Victor and society both seem concerned with the morality of their scientific discoveries. Victor shows self doubt and concern about creating his “monster” after creating it. He also decides that creating another “monster” as a companion to his first creation would be a bad idea out of fear that the two would reproduce and create more “monsters” and cause destruction on earth. While Victor seems to have a clear idea about the morality of his creation, today’s moral lines are much more difficult for an entire society to decide upon. In today’s context controversy has arisen around embryonic research, abortion, assisted suicide, and other scientific medical research. In this way we see rising concern around the moral lines within the field of science. There continues to be rallies for and against different scientific fields that debate the morality of sciences across the world. For instance, just here in Pullman WA a planned parent hood was caught on fire by arsonists on September 4th, 2015 only 6 days ago in protests of abortions. Also a movement “defund planned parenthood” recently gained a lot of momentum after the release of a video which some believed to show illegal practices in the harvesting of fetal tissues at the cost of the mothers. In this way we can see that themes about scientific creation and destruction are still relevant today.