Theories of ethical decision making

Elvia Bautista and Ying Ying Yu’s essays are both about the duty based

approach. Ying Ying Yu feels compelled to become a lawyer instead of a

gardener because his family in essence chose that career for him and now it is

“too late for me to work toward another future, to let the foundations I have built

go to ruins”. Eliva feels duty bound to her brother to bring flowers to his grave in

order to remember him or make him feel like he is remembered.

I always found the process and state of grief to be nonsensical. The person is

dead. How does having a funeral or burying them in a coffin or urn in a fancy plot

with a chunk of stone help anyone? Why should you care what happens to your

matter when your soul has left it behind? Who cares if people say nice things

about you after you're dead? If they were really good friends and family they

would have told you while you were still alive. Bringing flowers because you feel

compelled to from some familial duty or bond is not to make the diseased feel

better. It's for you, how selfish.

As for Ying, I admit to not understanding a society in which your family has such

an important say in who you become. The idea that my father would tell me I

have to choose a specific career path is fricking bonkers. There seems to be little

sense of familial duty in modern America and I am not sure how I feel about a

culture who sees such a bond as central to who you become in life.