Perhaps she has always been sceptical but has kept her doubts to herself, for a quiet life. Speaking out against the mob can lead to ostracism or worse. Whether she speaks out now because she only now realises how unfair the lottery is, or whether she has long had doubts about it but has been too afraid to speak out, is another interesting question. It is only when Tessie is staring death in the face that she speaks out against it. (Indeed, we cannot even be sure that the villagers are acting out of a ‘religious’ belief per se: the actual ritual, aside from the stoning, has long been forgotten, and the tradition appears to have been emptied of any deeper meaning it ever had.) But the core message is the same: the villagers are ordinary working people who have simply been convinced that the lottery is normal because it’s always been part of village life. We don’t need to accept this quotation wholesale to see its applicability to Jackson’s story. Are the villagers evil for doing what they do to Tessie Hutchinson? Or are they good people who do something unspeakable but are convinced they are doing the right thing? And which is worse? Steven Weinberg famously observed that without religion the world would be full of good people doing things and evil people doing evil things, but for good people to do evil things, ‘that takes religion’. This moral question leads us to another difficult question.
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