Moral DecisionMaking in Tim OBriens On the Rainy

Moral Decision-Making in Tim O’Brien’s “On the Rainy River”

The Heinz Dilemma Heinz's dilemma is a frequently used example in many ethics and morality classes. One well-known version of the dilemma, used in Lawrence Kohlberg’s “Stages of Moral Development”, is stated as follows: A woman was near death. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to produce. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2, 000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $1, 000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: “No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it. ” So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man's laboratory to steal the drug for his wife. Should Heinz have broken into the laboratory to steal the drug for his wife? Why or why not?

From a psychological point of view… …it is not important what one thinks that Heinz should do. Kohlberg's theory holds that the justification one offers is what is significant.

Here’s how the study worked: Kohlberg observed that growing children advance through definite stages of moral development in a manner similar to their progression through Piaget's wellknown stages of cognitive development. His observations and testing of children and adults, led him to theorize that human beings progress consecutively from one stage to the next in an invariant sequence, not skipping any stage or going back to any previous stage. These are stages of thought processing, implying qualitatively different modes of thinking and of problem solving at each stage.

Kohlberg asserts that the way we form our moral base is through debate and personal questioning of moral situations. It is very common to run through these stages mentally as we toil with inner conflict in our own life decisions. YOUR TASK: Throughout the entire story (chapter), narrator Tim runs through reasons why he should or should not go to Vietnam either through directly telling the audience or alluding to stories and experiences that show us his line of personal questioning. Using textual evidence, identify a point in the story for each stage of Kohlberg’s moral reasoning, as Tim moves through each while contemplating his decision. MARK THEM IN YOUR BOOK.