Effects of Law and Storytelling on Building Morality

All people develop a sense of morality as they age and learn throughout life. Just as a person will grow and change, so will one’s moral principles, affected by many variations of factors depending on said person’s lifestyle. The two most influential factors of a person’s moral growth are governmental rules and regulations and the experiences of other people from which one can learn.

As a prime example, the article “The Nuremberg Laws Deprived Jews of Their Rights in Nazi Germany” by Encyclopedia Britannica provides insight on two sets of laws that were discriminatory against all races other than the purest “Aryan race.” The Nuremberg Laws, established by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, named Jews as “subjects of the state,” prohibited Jews in public schools, pools, and movie theaters, and refused Jews citizenship, along with many other dehumanizing, racist laws. In Nazi Germany, “morality and truth were judged by this standard: whether it was in the interest and preservation of the Volk.” Such is a demonstration that the Nuremberg Laws decided what was ethically wrong or right for millions of people, and that they were the seed from which racism grew in the nation’s younger generation, the flowers of which would be embedded in their society for years after.

To continue, in the essay “Walking with Living Feet,” Dara Horn narrates her experience at a museumified concentration camp in Poland. She struggled with her emotions at first, describing a mental blockade that she felt preventing her tears from falling and any emotion from showing itself. Until, however, she saw a display of thousands upon thousands of shoes preserved after the camp’s liquidation. She saw them, “thousands of shoes, each pair different, each pair silently screaming someone’s murdered dreams,” and her tears finally came, her strong remorse was felt. In the moment, she was thinking of the adults and the children who had worn each pair of shoes, and the torture that they’d endured, which ultimately, had lead them to only death. Being reminded of the people that died in the same building in which she stood, feeling heart wrenching remorse served to develop her sense of morality further, led her to realize exactly the inhumanity of the Holocaust.

On the other hand, in the above mentioned essay, some may find a counterpoint to the argument that laws and the experiences of other people are the most important for the growth of morals. When Dara exclaims, “No book can teach me what I saw there with my own eyes!”, one might say, using this quote as evidence, that personal experiences are more prominent in the growth of a sense of ethics than laws or other people’s experiences. Although this is a good point, only one experience is not as strong as learning from an entire group of other experiences. Also, conflict might arise when a person who has learned only from his/her own life comes in contact with concepts that differ his/her own. One experience is not nearly enough to learn the truly right or wrong things to do.

Finally, in Elie Wiesel’s Night, he recounts his life during the three years in which he was living in a concentration camp. Wiesel has since been granted the Nobel Peace Prize of 1986, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Humanities Medal, the Lifetime Literary Achievement Award, and five other awards. Throughout his experience in the Holocaust, he watched so many of his people, friends and family, lose hope, diminish as people, and ultimately die. He himself was ripped from his mother and sister, beaten, forced to work, starved, and watched his father die. When he was finally released, he looked at himself in a mirror; “from the depths of a mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.” (115) Because Wiesel did indeed face the Holocaust -and survive it, we know that we can trust him; he learned from his own experience that the torture he endured would haunt him forever, and was one that he would never wish on anyone. And we learn from his experience with the Holocaust’s destruction of humanity what we think is the wrong thing- or the maybe the right thing, depending on what you learn -to do.

By and large, government regulations and the things one can learn from the experiences of other people -whether in the context of historical events like the Holocaust, or in the context of family and friends- are the two most influential factors of a person’s moral growth. As evidenced by the Nuremberg Laws, those in a society will use government-established rules to develop their own moral compass. As well, from Elie Wiesel’s Night and Dara Horn’s “Walking With Living Feet,” we can conclude that experiences outside of one’s own can influence a person’s moral growth. Though there are many, many factors from which one can develop a strong sense of morality, laws and other people’s experiences are the most significant.