Ethics and Conflict in Young Adult Literature

Meet our Contributor:

Dr. Amy Piotrowski is an associate professor of English education at Utah State University. She teaches undergraduate courses in English education and secondary education as well as graduate courses in literacy. Her scholarly interests focus on digital literacies, young adult literature, and English teacher education. Her most recent chapter, “Issues of Identity in YA Science Fiction Depicting Artificial Intelligence and Cybernetics,” was published in the book Identity, Criticality, and Advocacy in Young Adult Literature: Training Teachers to Empower Students in the ELA Classroom. Before going into teacher education, she taught middle school Language Arts, high school English, and college composition in Texas.

Ethics and Conflict in Young Adult Literature by Dr. Amy Piotrowski

Young adult literature, especially science fiction and fantasy, tells stories about adolescent characters who are involved in ethically difficult conflicts. As Dr. Melanie Hundley pointed out in her post a few weeks ago, reading young adult literature can be a way for adolescent students and their teachers to examine issues of ethics that we face in our current world of digital technologies and artificial intelligence. Two of my graduate students and I concur with this assertion in a recently published book chapter, in which we argue that young adult science fiction shows that “as humans use technological tools, we must remember our humanity and not become too machine-like ourselves” (Piotrowski, Billings, and Chamberlain, 2026).

​Ethically thorny situations in young adult literature encourage students to consider different ways of handling conflict. Noddings (2002, 2013) in her work on ethics education defines ethical caring as being curious about others, engaging in dialogue with people from different backgrounds, and being able to live and work with others with whom we might disagree. She argues that to develop an ethic of care, kids and adolescents need models of and to practice ethical caring.

Conflicts in young adult literature are often tied to struggles for freedom and more just societies. Historian Timothy Snyder argues in the book On Freedom that freedom often gets defined as the absence of anyone telling us what to do, and that this view of freedom is incomplete. Snyder defines freedom as making decisions about who we want to be and figuring out how we might put that into lived practice. In this definition, freedom is when we discern what we believe matters and then act on what is important to us.

With Nodding’s and Snyder’s ideas in mind, here are three young adult series that depict characters who must make ethically fraught choices in the face of difficult conflicts. These series also examine how one’s choices can be shaped and constrained by society. Through these stories, students can think about ethics, as well as the challenges of putting our ethical values into action.

The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping

​This most recent entry in the series focuses on the Hunger Games as propaganda, a show where the Capitol uses its technology to control the narrative. The choices that Panem’s adolescents have are constrained by brute force - because that brute force is Capitol’s only play in a game so rigged it isn’t much of a game at all. Glamorous exteriors hide the corruption and deeply-rooted incompetence of the Capitol. Pressure is put on adolescents, first Haymitch and then Katniss, to take actions towards overthrowing the Capitol and by doing so end long-standing oppression. It’s also notable that one of the most powerful acts of resistance in the novel might be the brave efforts of the Newcomers alliance to humanize the tributes from the Districts, even though those efforts end up overshadowed by the Capitol’s propaganda.

Annals of the Western Shore trilogy

​I’ve written about this series for this blog before, and I bring it up again here as a counter-example to The Hunger Games series. This series features protagonists who are the opposite of the “girl on fire” archetype inspired by Katniss Everdeen. In each of their respective stories, Orrec, Gry, Memer, and Gavir must figure out how they want to live, even when the brutal social systems that they live in will not be overthrown. The ethical thing to do can be building one’s own life despite the society one lives in. Violence might be unwise even when it is justified. The protagonists of this series must decide for themselves how to use their abilities in order to be free, and that might mean leaving behind the life they have known.

Arc of a Scythe series

Citra and Rowan are shown two ways of being a scythe during their apprenticeships: a solemn responsibility versus wielding unchecked power over others. These different ways of being a scythe impact their sense of ethics. Citra develops a mix of compassion and ruthlessness that in part grows from Curie’s encouragement to take on corruption from within the Scythedom. Rowan, on the other hand, is brutalized into the self-serving ways of Goddard, but he then takes action against corrupt scythes. Meanwhile, the benevolent AI, the Thunderhead, finds loopholes to get around the guardrails in its programming in order to do things that it calculates as being likely to lead to a good outcome for humanity. Bending the rules and finding ways to argue that something technically isn’t prohibited by law or rule are common actions in this series, leading the reader to think about the importance of ethics in a technologically advanced society.

Ethical Issues Across Texts

These novels, taken together, highlight several key issues:
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• Fighting for a different future vs. walking away to build one’s own future
• Tension between responsibility to one’s self and responsibility to family/community
• Reconciliation: Is it possible, and if so, how to go about it?
• Adolescents are pushed to address conflicts inflamed by older generations

 
These young adult series feature ethically nuanced protagonists that adolescent readers can learn from. What stories help you and your students think about ethics and conflict?

References

Noddings, N. (2002). Educating moral people. Teachers College Press.
Noddings, N. (2013). Caring: A relational approach to ethics and moral education. University of California Press.
Piotrowski, A., Billings, R., & Chamberlain, K. (2026). Issues of identity in YA science fiction depicting artificial intelligence and cybernetics. In S. C. Mayer & A. Hayes. (Eds.). Identity, criticality, and advocacy in young adult literature: Training teachers to empower students in the ELA classroom (pp. 13-21). Routledge.
Snyder, T. (2024). On freedom. Crown.