AMS Question Post

In Arthur Miller’s play, All My Sons, many of the characters make choices between helping their family or society. One of the main choices of the play is Mr. Keller’s decision to ship out defective airplane parts in order to protect the family’s business. His whole idea behind doing this was that he was doing it for his son. At one point he yells, “For you, a business for you!” (Miller, 70). The most important thing to Keller was his son, and by shipping those parts out he was protecting his son’s birth right. As if to clarify why he did it, Keller tells his son that, “You lay forty years into a business and they know you out in five minutes, what could I do, let them take forty years, let them take my life away?” (Miller, 69). Keller’s life had been put into creating something for his son, and he wasn’t about to have that taken away. His son, Chris, doesn’t see things in the same light. He served in the war, and had a completely different perspective on social responsibility. In an argument with his father he says, “I was dying every day and you were killing my boys” (Miller, 70). Chris’ perspective serves as the counter-argument to Keller’s position. He saw in the war that everyone has a responsibility to one another. Throughout the play, Miller writes for both sides, and asks what is ethical in the play.

The choice of whether to benefit your family or the society in an important ethical decision. Of course, ethics is just a question of moral standards and conduct. The problem is that there is no perfect answer to all of life’s issues. In this case, you are going to hurt someone. So for this decision, a person has to ask themselves which is more important to them. They could say that the whole purpose of society is to protect groups of individuals, that people in their family are more important that the faceless unknowns who do not impact their life. In this instance, a person would opt to help their family instead. People close to them are much more important to their lives than people they’ve never met. On the other hand, someone might say that they have a social responsibility to the society. Like a social contract, they could see themselves as a part of community, and see that that it is only right that they should try to help the community they are in. Maybe they see everyone as an equal. In the end, though, it all depends at how a person looks at their relationship to family and society.