Ethics of Julius Caesar One Thesis

Here Shakespeare reinforces the notion that murder is not the way to go about solving one's problems. Myron Taylor notes that the play is filled with a "strong element of irony" (Taylor 307) because what they get after killing Caesar is worse than they imagined. The conspirators are convinced that Caesar will become a dictator because of his attitude regarding his power. When Brutus speaks to the people, he convinces them that his love for them and their country caused him to kill Caesar. When he asks them if they would rather die as slaves with Caesar living or die as free men with Caesar dead, we see his fears surface. Schanzer notes that the answer lies in Brutus' question. His accusation of Caesar was too ambitious is "vague" (Schanzer 48) but very clear. The characters' dispositions at the end of the play also illustrate the answer to the question of how ethical the murder of Caesar was. Maurice Charney notes that Brutus' opinion about the murder changes because at the beginning of the play, Brutus' opinion is based upon "unfounded, conditional reasoning" (Charney 215). After some time, however, he realizes that the murder was based upon possibilities rather than facts. She writes, "Seeing the ascension of a triumvirate more ruthless and tyrannical than Caesar ever was" (215) forces him to see the error of his ways. He, like the others, becomes his own victim of the law of unintended consequences.He would never have guessed anything to be worse than Caesar, but that was only because he did not allow himself to think that far ahead or beyond what the others were feeding him.

We can look at the moral of the conspirators' actions by looking at the result they render. In the case of Caesar's death, we can see how wrong the conspirators were by seeing the war they brought upon themselves. They let their fears get the best of them and they let this fear cloud their judgment. In addition, they let their fear block their reason. They could not envision anything worse than Caesar and that was their biggest mistake. They saw him as the greatest threat but they learn the difficult lesson that he was not. Caesar might have had his own problems but they are not the worst things that the people could have faced. We learn that any action, if it is unethical, will never result in anything good, regardless of how it is rationalized.

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books. 1998.

Charney, Maurice, ed. Julius Caesar. Logan: The Perfection Form Company. 1983.

Taylor, Myron. "Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and the Irony of History." Shakespeare Quarterly. 1973. JSTOR Resource Database.

Schanzer Ernest. The Problem Plays….....