Where should Isma’s Loyalty lie: with her brother or her country? By informing the police of Paravaize’s intentions did she make the right or wrong decision? Can there be a correct moral decision when faced with the impossible choices between family loyalty and duty to society?

Isma is the embodiment of sacrifice who discontinues her higher education to earn a living for her family consisting of a brother and a sister.

Ethics is a philosophical discipline, invented in Greek history. It deals with the morality of an action and critiques what is good and bad to pursue in life. Ethics is a normative discipline which means that it is what is thought to be correct by most but can not be measurable. People discussing morality are grouped into two groups of common believes: Moral Subjectivists are people who believe that morality is subjective and so there is no clear, distinct answer to whether something is ethical and moral. On the other hand, Moral Realists believe that every action can be judged as ethical or unethical and can be agreed upon by all. In my opinion, Ethics is a subjective topic and the morality of an action can be viewed very differently from people with different perspectives, interests, and relationships. When thinking about ethics in relation to the book “Home Fire”, a question of whether Isam’s actions of confronting her younger brother to the police for joining ISIS and cutting any connections with him is the moral and ethical thing to do. As I said before, since ethics is subjective, Isma’s actions can be viewed as either write or wrong or even partially write and wrong at the same time. In evaluating Isam’s ethics we are judging her loyalty to her home state against the loyalty to her beloved family. The question is which should take priority? In a situation that will sacrifice one of the ethical responsibilities, a person has, what should be their top priority? In the book, “Home Fire” Isma is the older sister of her younger twins Parvaise and Aneeka who she raised and took care of as they were left orphans from parents.

Isma always put her family at her top priority and discontinues her higher education to earn a living for her family. Her frugality helps her family survive difficult times. From that, the reader’s impression is that her family is the top priority of Isma. Although, when she finds out that her younger brother, Parvaiz joined ISIS in search of his father’s past, Isama doesn’t think twice and calls the police, preventing him from being able to go back. Isma, acting as a “good citizen”, devoted to her country, stays true to the law and helps the police in finding the resisting to the law, even if it means, like in this case, her brother. In this sense, some might argue that Isma did the right thing, by staying loyal to the country she was raised in. Others might argue that although she stayed true to her country, she went against her loved one, against her blood relative, her younger innocent brother, and by doing that completely abandoned her family duties that are for many are at the top of the importance. Aneeka, Isma’s younger sister found her action very disloyal, going against their brother. In contrast in the government’s perspective, Isma did an honorable action. The reason for Isma in confronting her brother is not very clear, whether she did it for her’s and her sister’s own sake, so if the government finds out they wouldn’t get in too much trouble, or whether it was because she already had a bad reputation due to her dad joining ISIS and she didn’t want to worsen that so minimized it by acting like a “hero” or whether she was following her own intuition and though she is taking the ethical and appropriate action. In any case, in my opinion, her action was not purely loyal but also not purely nonloyal. She couldn’t satisfy both sides and so chose the country on top of her family.