Ethics and Book-Reading

Just this fall break I was using the 8 steps of ethical decision-making. Earlier this summer, my family had stopped into a Barnes and Noble. Naturally, while I roamed the stacks, my mom and sister immediately located the Starbucks and ordered their drinks, settling down for a long stay chatting in the café. My younger brother, not ever one to pass up a highly caffeinated and sugary drink, received his coffee before asking for my help to find a new book to read. We ended up searching the young adult shelves and found him a book that was part of a series. Over break, he finished the second book of this series and is now impatiently waiting for the author to finish the third. I have always encouraged my brother to read because it’s awesome, and because it gets him off his staple diet of using either his cellphone or the Xbox. Therefore, I should have seen it coming when he asked me to read the series myself.

            This is when I recognized my need to react because my first reaction was a very firm “no.” I did not want to read the young adult novel that most likely featured angsty teenagers, a pair of said teenagers in love, and the plot set in some sort of dystopia. Yes, call me a pretentious book snob. I’ve earned it. However, I did not say any of these thoughts aloud to my brother when he first asked me because I recognized the need to react. This was something my brother was highly interested in, and he knew that I loved reading, and he wanted to share this with me. My reaction needed some consideration. This is when I began to define the ethical dimension. Normally, I’d say if you tell someone that you’re not going to read a book he or she recommended, it’s not a big ethical dilemma. However, like I said before, I had to remember that I was the only bookworm in the family, I was the one who encouraged my brother to read, and he was trying to share his experience with me. I could not in good conscious just dismiss my brother’s request.

            Next, I started to think about the significance of the ethical dimension. I considered that if I said no to my brother, I could be discouraging him to read in the future. I was also denying him the joy of sharing and talking about his reading experience with others, which as an English major, who does this frequently as a student in class, I felt saddened at this realization. None of these things I wanted to happen, so I took responsibility for the ethical solution. The abstract ethical rule that I was applying to the situation was, funnily enough, responsibility. I felt like I was the one responsible to promote my brother’s habit of reading, since no one else would really do it at home, and I was the one who helped him find this book series, so I was responsible for his love of the novels and my own predicament.

            All of these thoughts went through my mind and had me arriving at the only concrete solution: to read the book. While I don’t believe all of this emotional manipulation was running through my brother’s head (if it was, he’s an evil mastermind), I agreed to read the first installment of the series. Before I acted and promised my brother to read it, I had to come to terms with the potential consequences of my decision: future book-reading of dystopias and teenagers. Lacking any enthusiasm for this future, I realized that my decision still had the better tradeoff. While encouraging my brother to read, I could also be the Yoda to his Luke Skywalker and show him the way of good taste in books. My days reading young adult novels would be limited.

As a final note, if anyone asks me after winter break (the time in which I promised to read the book) I can give you my review of Scythe by Neal Shusterman, so keep tabs.