The answer to this really depends on your own personal opinion. You can argue Rikki Tikki is hypocritical in the story "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi," but you can also argue he only attacks the snakes and their eggs in self-defense.
It is certainly possible to say Rikki Tikki is hypocritical. He asks Nag why Nag thinks he should be allowed to eat Darzee’s baby. This implies it is bad to kill the children of other animals. He then goes and kills Nag and Nagaina’s babies that are soon to hatch from their eggs, which for the animals is the moral equivalent of Nag killing Darzee’s baby. It is also hypocritical—or at least silly—to be angry at a snake for eating a baby bird since cobras are carnivores and will eat some living creature no matter what. It is silly to be mad at Nag for doing what his instinct calls him to do.
On the other hand, we can say Rikki Tikki is not being hypocritical. He does not destroy Nag’s children without provocation the way Nag eats Darzee’s child. When Nag first meets Rikki Tikki, he and his wife try to kill the mongoose in cold blood. Later, they try to kill the English family that lives in the bungalow in order to make Rikki Tikki leave. It is only after they do this that Rikki Tikki kills Nag and destroys the eggs. Therefore, we can argue that Rikki Tikki acted in self-defense while Nag did not, making their actions morally different.
Monday, October 21, 2013
In "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi," Rikki Tikki destroys Nag and Nagaina's eggs, even though he was appalled that Nag ate one of Darzee's fledglings. Are Rikki-tikki's actions justified or is he being a hypocrite?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Summarize the major research findings of "Toward an experimental ecology of human development."
Based on findings of prior research, the author, Bronfenbrenner proposes that methods for natural observation research have been applied in ...
-
One way to support this thesis is to explain how these great men changed the world. Indeed, Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) was the quintes...
-
Polysyndeton refers to using several conjunctions in a row to achieve a dramatic effect. That can be seen in this sentence about the child: ...
-
Both boys are very charismatic and use their charisma to persuade others to follow them. The key difference of course is that Ralph uses his...
-
At the most basic level, thunderstorms and blizzards are specific weather phenomena that occur most frequently within particular seasonal cl...
-
Equation of a tangent line to the graph of function f at point (x_0,y_0) is given by y=y_0+f'(x_0)(x-x_0). The first step to finding eq...
-
Population policy is any kind of government policy that is designed to somehow regulate or control the rate of population growth. It include...
-
Gulliver cooperates with the Lilliputians because he is so interested in them. He could, obviously, squash them underfoot, but he seems to b...
No comments:
Post a Comment