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Utilitarianism In Brave New World

Decent Essays

Many people think of books as simply words chosen to conceive a wonderfully entertaining story, put on pages and bound together; this assertion could not be further from the truth. The most prolific writers do indeed formulate amazing worlds with intriguing worlds and wonderful characters coming together form phenomenal stories, but they usually contain much deeper commentary on a number of issues. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s psychological thriller Crime and Punishment and Aldous Huxley’s dystopian fiction Brave New World are among those books which conceal much deeper themes beneath their covers, and truly are similar in the ideas that they cover. Yes, the differences between the books are many; Crime and Punishment is a novel about a murder in mid-1800s …show more content…

The one most undeniably scrutinized in both of these books is utilitarianism. First off, the entirety of Brave New World is an example of the principles of utilitarianism gone awry, creating a world that would be horrifying to anyone living in the contemporary world. Like any utilitarian, the people in Brave New World value two things above all else: happiness and usefulness. It sounds rather innocent and innocuous, until one realizes what one must achieve to create a world enveloped in only positive and focusing only on what is useful and efficient. In order to facilitate an efficient world without negative thoughts, the regime ruling the world has destroyed the familial unit in favor of automating children’s birth and development, purposely stunted the intellect of whole swathes of the population, is encouraging people to hide any unhappiness with drugs and wanton sex, and threatens to suppress any dissidents who may disturb the peace. The purpose of presenting this type of world it to show that to achieve a “perfect society” for people who subscribe to utilitarianism, the total and utter breakdown of all of our modern morals, liberties, rights, and most importantly, our humanity, must be enacted. By doing this, Aldous Huxley is attempting to make the reader a skeptic of philosophies that present themselves as a

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