Film and Ethics
Of those actions that do have a moral status, what features of the action
determine whether it is morally right or morally wrong? This is the central
question within moral philosophy.
determine whether it is morally right or morally wrong? This is the central
question within moral philosophy.
Using the diagram in Figure 6.1, this question boils down to: What is special about the set of morally right actions that sets them apart as morally right? Finding the answer to this question is the first step toward determining, for any given action, whether it is right or wrong.
Different ethical theories propose different answers to this question. Some theories view the consequences that arise from an action as decisive in determining the moral status of that action. Thus, an action that produces overall good consequences is morally preferable to an action that produces overall poor consequences. Other ethical theories ignore consequences altogether and focus instead on the intentions of the actor what hewas trying to do when he performed that action.
If an actor had good intentions when he performed the action, then the action is morally good never mind that horrendous consequences may have accidentally been produced.
Obviously, the above sketch is just a sketch. Philosophers owe us much more detail in fleshing out the individual theories. For example, what constitutes good consequences? How does one figure out what the relevant consequences of an action are?
In the case of theories that focus on intentions, what are good intentions? As we shall see, the major ethical theories do specify these things in detail. For now, we shall hold off an examination of the individual ethical theories and discuss them in the context of their depiction in Crimes and Misdemeanors and Gone Baby Gone.
We should warn the reader that, while our presentation of ethics is fairly standard, there are some dissenting voices in the history of ethics that we must omit for space reasons.
The way in which contemporary philosophers understand ethics would have seemed quite foreign to ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle.
While the current standard is to treat ethics as dealing primarily with moral evaluation of actions, the Ancients viewed ethics as concerned primarily with evaluation of whole persons in particular, ethics in classical Greece was concerned first and foremost with evaluating character traits that made an individual good. Some modern ethicists (e.g., Alisdair MacIntyre) have called for a return to the classical understanding of the proper domain of ethics.