The love of mother

As I mentioned earlier in the previous blog, ethic is everywhere. It is in our daily activity, it is in our behavior towards a problem or situation, it is in business etiquette, etc. And we can even see it in the sagas which we had read during our childhood life. In the sagas, it always has the existence of two forces, moral and immoral. At the end of the sagas, the moral force will be the winner and most of the immoral sides are received punishment. We all believe that those immoral forces deserve to be punished. However, in some situations, have you ever thought that why the immoral characters choose to act unethically? Later, I would like to share a ethical dilemma which is in the famous and popular saga: Cinderella.

We all know that Cinderella is the unlucky young girl. She lives with her step-mother who has two daughters before married with Cinderella’s father. The step-mother gives all her love to the two naughty daughters. In contrast, Cinderella is given the enmity from the step-mother and the two step-sisters. One day, there is an announcement that the king invites all the beauties in town come to the party in order to choose the princess for the prince. The step-mother provides the most beautiful dress for her daughters to join the party and doesn’t give a chance for Cinderella to attend the party. She gives all the house works for Cinderella to do and ask her to finish it before she comes back from the party. Why is it so? It all comes from the love of the mother for her children. The step-mother thinks that Cinderella will be her daughters’ rival in the princess election party. From here, we can see that the step-mother is choosing unethical ways to treat Cinderella. You may think that this is not an ethical dilemma at all. This is just one of the details in the sagas. But yet, in real life, there also have similar situations. We also know that real life is different from sagas. Somehow, the saga is a reflection of the real society.

From this story, I would like to share true similar situation which I read from a newspaper few months ago in Vietnamese online newspaper. There is widow who had 2 sons. One of them is fosterling named Tung. The other is named Tien. Tung is orphan since he was 6 years old and he is her nephew. Later, the widow brought Tung back home and took-care him as her son. Even though Tung was just her fosterling, she loved him as Tien. Over the time, Tung and Tien grew up together, had a good job and implemented a son’s responsibility to the widow. They are good children in the thought of everybody. Unfortunately, Tung and Tien love the same girl. At first, both of them don’t know about that. Later, when they share their feeling to each other, they realized that and decided to have a fair competition. As a result, Tung has the girl with her heart. Tien was disappointed. He found that it’s hard to survive without the girl. Tung didn’t know that at all. However, their mother realized the case and consulted Tien to forget the girl. Despite his mother’s advice, he still gave her a tragedy love. Tien could not focus on work because of that reason. It leads to he became unemployment. The mother got hurt because of that. She tried her best to introduce another girlfriend for him. However, it doesn’t work. Besides that, she could not tell this situation to Tung as well because she didn’t want Tung faced to a dilemma situation. The ethical dilemma occurred from this moment. The mother was thinking that she should take back the girl from Tung for Tien or she just ignored Tien with the broken heart. If she helped Tien to get the girl, it would be unethical for her standard of behavior. But yet, she really could not stand when seeing Tien downed day by day. It’s hard for her to choose either Tung or Tien because both of them are her children. Nevertheless, she chose to act unethically, she tried to create the misunderstanding between Tung and his girlfriend in order for them to break up. All of her bad acts came from the love for her son. Although she took-care of Tung since he was child, he’s just her fosterling. It’s hard her to love Tung as much as Tien.

From the situation above, it can be said that if everyone of us do act unethically, it musts have a reason. We cannot simply give a judgment on what they are doing and how they do that. It is because we were not them, we cannot understand them as they understand themselves. Sometimes, we think that it’s hard for us to tolerate a person. But yet, when we are facing the same situation, will we do the same thing? It’s a tough answer. Ethic is an abstract, we cannot touch it, just can feel it.