Nature's Metaphor: A Reflection on Morality

Natural Reflections of Morality

It is well known that when we are confronted with the view of people outside of our daily existence, we are forced to question our assumptions about who we are and what the way we live life means. When you drive around with a messy car filled with fast food wrappers, you don’t notice them until you offer to give someone a ride. When Montaigne met members from a more primitive society in Brazil it made him confront his own ideas on what it meant to be a moral human being. This confrontation opened up many great thoughts on the subject.

As a metaphor, he talked about plants in nature, not being wilder, but being more natural. He said that the plants found in the wild were more natural than the artificially changed

They executed prophets when their prophecies did not come true, so that a false prophet would never be seen again. The cannibals had no need for war other than to prove their valor, strength, and earn glory. They did not loot or take from their fallen enemies. When they would go to war the men displayed at their home the decapitated heads of their victims, but also at the same time took prisoners who were treated very well. The cannibals were very hospitable and would make sure their prisoners last days were great, to try and make them want to live even more. They enjoyed taunting their prisoners of their impending doom and the prisoners would taunt back, never asking to be spared, but choosing death over cowardice. Montaigne points out that the cannibals did not drag out the deaths of their captives with torture or cruel slow deaths, as his people would do to their captives. Montaigne says he is sorry for the barbarity of his own people and for their arrogance to judge the acts of the cannibals while ignoring their own terrible actions. He goes on to list tortures and practices done by his own society that are all more barbaric than eating the cooked flesh of someone after they have been killed. He is saying that the methods used by the cannibals are more morally correct and conscious of the captive than