Martin Luther King & George Orwell

Martin Luther King and George Orwell's representations of an ethical society

Civil rights movement leader Martin Luther King and novelist George Orwell had been known for their political discourses regarding the extent of the government's responsibility to civil society. In the essay "My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence" by King and "Shooting an Elephant" by Orwell, each author's discourse contemplated the kind of ethical society that humanity should have. Their discussion centered on their experiences as members of a society where civil strife and inequality were the norm, devoid of each author's standards in an ethical (i.e., 'ideal') society. In King's "My Pilgrimage," he shared with readers the path he took and underwent in order to achieve his "intellectual odyssey to nonviolence." Citing famous works on the Enlightenment and Capitalism, such as Bentham, Mill, Rousseau, Marx, and Nietzsche, he realized that for him, an ethical society cannot be found in the radical views of these philosophers. Rather, what constituted an ethical society was found in the principles Gandhi, which he described, " ... The superman philosophy of Nietzsche, I found in the nonviolent resistance philosophy of Gandhi." It is therefore King's stance that an ethical society is an egalitarian society that is able to transcend the limits of a value-laden culture of humanity, provided, of course, that this ethical society already knows the clear distinction between right and wrong actions and behavior. Orwell, meanwhile, represented his notion of what society should not be like through the evidently unethical nature of the British-controlled Burmese society. An unethical society for him was one where there are no clear distinctions between right and wrong; wherein decisions made by the individual were based not on ethics but on the constant pressure of a society that is stricken with injustice, discrimination, and poverty, such as the Burmese society.