To Kill a Mockingbird Theme of Morality and Ethics

Are morals a matter of community standards or individual conscience? Where do the rights of the community end and the rights of the individual begin? To Kill a Mockingbird examines the conflict between the individual and the community when each has a different standard of right and wrong. On the one hand, the individual who stands up for his or her personal belief gets grief from everyone else. But on the other, such solitary stubbornness might drag the whole community in a more satisfactory direction – a community’s morals are, after all, the sum of what its individuals believe.

1. What do individual characters in the novel base their ideas of right and wrong on?
2. How does the community work to enforce collective standards of morality? Where do those collective standards come from?
3. What moral principles does the novel suggest are desirable? Does anything in the novel undermine these moral principles?
4. Does Bob Ewell have bad morals or no morals? What’s the difference?

Atticus presents himself as morally consistent – the same at home as on the streets – but really he has two moral systems: one for himself based on strict rectitude, and one for others based on sympathetic understanding.

While the novel in general presents honesty as a virtue, it also suggests that honesty is not always the best policy.