Divergent and the class discussion on Thursday

Yesterday, after enjoying the sunshine and delicious barbecue in Cameron Park, my friends and I decided to watch a movie to end our days. We chose Divergent, which is rating 7.5 on IMDb, and we thought it would be a better choice than Rio 2 (well, guys thought so, I was not).  Well, I really enjoy the love story between the handsome hero and heroine. However, it is not a really good movie in my view. I really should watch Rio 2, animation could always make me feel excited.

The reason why I put this movie together with our class discussion on Thursday is that I though it reflect the relationship between the moral and intellect. First of all, I don't believe, a person could be morally good after just taking a couple of class in the moral fields. Because, at least, taking class for some students is not a sake of self-flourishing, instead, is sake of finishing the requirement of their degrees.  For the students who taking the classes for the sake of graduation,  it is really hard for us to expect that they would be more morally at the end of the semester. And the for the students who taking the classes for the sake of self-flourishing, maybe we could expect they would be morally mature, but only expect.

Education could only be a way to improve the morality in one, but would nor determine one's morality. And at the same time, even though education could help the "students" establish and improve their morality, the effect of the higher education such as universities and college would be really weak. On the other hand, the environment where one grew up, and the family education and primary education one received since one was young would be have essential influence on one's moral development.

Most of the "evil" person in the movie or in the reality, they were doing the "evil" things based on their believes. Well, I mean the really evil person, not the "bad" people.  The really "evil" people choose to do the "right" things they believed to be right. In the movie, the women who choose to maintain the world system that divided people into five main factions, and to kill the people who is not fit in to the system, divergent, which means they would destroy the system, would be seen as just do what she believed is right. She said couple of times in the movie, "Human nature is not good for keeping peace". Well, maybe that is true, but she is on the track that prohibiting all the human natures, which is not moral good in the common sense. Why would they think in this way? Why would they control one group of people to kill another group of people, just because thy believed that the last group of people would destroy the existing system, which seems not that much reasonable but in their mind perfect? This woman is in the group of "wise". They know everything, and they have the most advantaged technology. Her intellect could say in a really high level, and she know what she is doing, and also she believed what she is doing is totally right. The moral wrong action is based on her wrong belief.

However, for most of the bad people, we could say, they just not totally understanding what is good and what is wrong. Yes,  they know, but they don't understand. For this group of people, education may work on they, but not the education we received from the universities and classes, but the education from the society. That why I thought Baylor could get the credits for this point. First of all, in this Christianity environment, most of us are expecting to behave good and seek for the goods of each other. And we have to attend chapels. We are expected to attend mission trips and mission services. Baylor provides the students various opportunities to learn from the societies. But, at the same time, this is just an expectation.

Moral education should be an obligation of the family, school, and society. And I believed the family environment and the education in primary and middle school should account more. It is really hard for the higher education to help re-establish one's moralities. However, it can do some improvement based on one's existing moralities.