Monday, November 13, 2017

What are the possible objections to the proposal in "A Modest Proposal"?

This depends on whether you are taking it literally (which is a fairly obvious genre mistake) or not. On a literal level, one could start by suggesting that eating babies is morally wrong. Next, there are health issues associated with cannibalism, including a group of diseases known as Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy, which are incurable. Finally, babies would not be a sustainable food source as humans breed fairly slowly.

On a more serious level, reading the work as the satire it actually is, one can argue that it may call attention to the problem of Irish poverty, but it doesn't actually provide practical solutions. The problem had to do not only with land ownership but with over-reliance on a single crop, the potato, for food, and the ensuing devastating effects of periodic potato blights. Although Swift's writing did point out the problem of Irish poverty, it did not really discuss the causes or how they might be remedied. 

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