The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

           The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was a great book, that I truly enjoyed reading. In the novel, Dr. Jekyll is wealthy doctor; he creates a potion of a mixture of different drugs that brings out the evil in him. When he takes the drug he becomes a different person who is known as Mr. Hyde. Mr. Hyde is Dr. Jekyll however; he does not look or act in the same way. After taking the drug numerous times Mr. Hyde’s becomes more and more out of control to the point where he actually kills people. Dr. Jekyll becomes aware of the horrible acts he is doing when he becomes Hyde and wants to put an end to the transformation. His attempt at trying to stop the transformation fails, as he cannot stop turning into Hyde even when he does not take the drug.

            The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has a lot of examples of moral decision- making, but I will narrow the story and talk about one moral decision-making example that occurs in the story. Dr. Jekyll is a Christian man and realizes that his potion that turns him into Mr. Hyde is making him do things that are against his religious beliefs. Dr. Jekyll realizes that the only option to stop Mr. Hyde from making bad decisions is to kill Mr. Hyde. Killing Mr. Hyde would mean that he would have to commit suicide, but committing suicide is a sin. This decision-making would fall under the category of virtue ethics because, Dr. Jekyll was Christian man and if he was too commit suicide then he would commit a major sin. At the same time if he does not commit suicide to prevent his transformation to Hyde would mean he could kill more people, which is another major sin. 

            At the end of the story Dr. Jekyll is found dead in his laboratory, but we do not know how he died. Did he have to make the decision to commit suicide to make sure Mr. Hyde would never commit a murder again or did Mr. Hyde somehow kill off Dr. Jekyll? The ending of the book was very confusing for that reason, but maybe the ending was supposed to make the reader wonder what decision he made. I think that both decisions would be very hard to make, but the correct way to solve the problem would be for him to commit suicide, because Dr. Jekyll lost control of his transformations to Mr. Hyde and if he kept on changing into the beast of Mr. Hyde then he would continue to commit many more sins even though he was not trying.