moral rightness Essay

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Gurov and Moral Rightness
Moral rightness can be defined to me as the pursuit of happiness, because in the essay “We Have No “Right To Happiness” author C.S. Lewis says “It has been laid down that one of the rights of a man is right to “the pursuit of happiness.”(Lewis 3). To be truly happy is to be ultimately good. To be good means to do whatever is right, and whatever a person does in the pursuit of their own happiness is done based off the ideals of overall good virtue. Therefore happiness (including pursuit of) and having virtuous morality go hand in hand. I am against the moral rightness of Dmitri Dmitritch Gurov’s actions in “The Lady with the Dog” because of this same reasoning. By virtuous I mean having temperance, respect, honesty, and persistence. Gurov’s actions were done for his own sake, but were not wholesomely virtuous, therefore his acts committed were non virtuous—intolerable, and morally wrong.
The first reason I think Gurov’s actions are morally wrong is because he showed no virtue of self control. He didn’t exhibit temperance; which is a persons’ self control regarding pleasure. Gurov committed an intolerable act by cheating on his wife. He couldn’t control his sexual tendencies which pushed him to be unfaithful. He had no remorse for what he did, and its obvious when he said “…did not like to be at home. He had begun being unfaithful to her long ago—had been unfaithful to her often…” (Chekhov 62). Cheating is morally wrong, and it is a sin. Regardless of whatever light one tries to shed on cheating, it’s still cheating and it’s still wrong. A person can argue in defense that Chekhov had a right to cheat because he was unhappy. Being married to his wife was his decision. If he couldn’t stand her but wanted to have true happiness, he could have tried to make the marriage work, and “when two people achieve lasting happiness, this is not solely because they are great lovers but because they are also—I must put it crudely—good people; controlled, loyal, fair-minded, mutually adaptable people.”(Lewis 6). Instead he decided to take the easy way out and cheat on her, which instead makes him a sinner. Defending a person that cheats is like C.S Lewis says—“It is like having a morality in which stealing fruit is considered wrong—unless you steal nectarines.” (Lewis 5). As saying goes “once a cheater always a cheater”. There’s no exception for cheating and most likely when you do something once, unless you learnt a lesson, you’ll do it again.
Gurov definitely did not possess the virtue of respect. He had no respect for other peoples’ worth, especially women. We see this first with his wife, “…had been unfaithful to her often and, probably on that account, almost always spoke ill of women, and when they were talked about in his presence, used to call them the lower race.” (Chekhov 62). Boyd Creasman says in his article titled “Gurov’s Flights of Emotion in Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog” that even with Anna “Gurov enjoys Anna’s company at Yalta…then bored and annoyed with her sense of having sinned.” (Creasman 2). Any man that referred to women as the “lower race” and looked down on them in such a way that they had no value to him isn’t considered to be humane. If morality existed in him he would naturally treat both men and women equal. He does however show a change in the way he sees women when a conversation between him and the official he was playing cards with;
“If only you knew what a fascinating woman I made the acquaintance of in Yalta!”
The official got into his sledge and was driving away, but turned suddenly and shouted:
“Dmitri Dmitritch!”
“What?”
“You were right this evening: the sturgeon was a bit too strong!”
These words, so ordinary, for some reason moved Gurov indignation and struck him as degrading and unclean...” (Chekhov 70). Gurov feels some sort of turmoil within him, ready to comment ragingly about what the official said. However, this change of heart for women could only be
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