I went to see the
movie “American Sniper” in the theater this week, and overall I thought it was a great, albeit stressful, movie. The movie was in English, but it had Korean subtitles because I watched it in South Korea. It was based on a true story, and Bradley Cooper played Chris Kyle, who was a Navy Seal with four tours in
Iraq as a sniper. The movie showed the
ethical dilemmas that Chris faced when he was doing his job in Iraq, especially
when women and children were the ones who had weapons to be used against the U.S. military. There was one scene in the movie
where a little boy, who could not have been older than seven or eight years
old, picked up a rocket propelled grenade (RPG) and attempted to aim it at one of the U.S. military vehicles. He was very
unstable with the RPG; nevertheless, Chris kept
his eye on the little boy, but he was praying that the boy would drop the RPG and
not force him to take action.
Thankfully the boy did drop it and ran away, leaving Chris to let out a huge
sigh of relief because he absolutely did not want to shoot this little boy. It was obvious by the way that Chris was
portrayed that he did not want to kill anyone, and at one point he even said
that “the legend,” which is what people referred to him as, was not a good
nickname to earn. He claimed that he did
what he had to do in order to protect his men, but the movie did not portray
him as ever bragging about his kills in any way. When talking about ethical issues, killing is
almost always one topic that people mention.
Is killing ever morally justified?
Chris Kyle had to make several extremely tough decisions in the scenarios in the
movie; had he not taken the shots to stop the enemy, then the enemy would have
killed his fellow Americans. In these
scenarios, he was killing defensively, not offensively. He was killing the people who were on a
mission to end the lives of others. I
highly recommend this movie if you have not see it yet, and then I would love
to hear what you think about his ethical dilemmas.
This week I also watched a
movie called “Changing Lanes” where ethical issues were rampant throughout the
movie. If you have not seen this movie,
I recommend that you watch it, as well! Ben
Affleck and Samuel Jackson play the two main characters, and to give a brief
summary of the movie, they are at odds with one another over the aftermath of a
crash that caused both of their days to tumble in a downward spiral. This movie shows how deceitful actions can
snowball, continuing to grow larger and larger, until the situation is
completely out of control. Anyone who
has ever been in a situation like this knows that it is easy to lose sight of
which direction is up when you are in a spiral.
I think that watching movies that bring ethical issues to light is a
good way that we can reflect on how we would act if we were to ever find
ourselves in a similar scenario.
In my graduate course this week we started
learning about individual approaches to ethics. I read in my textbook about two famous
experiments, Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment and Milgram’s shock
experiment, and Bowman and West (2015) concluded that “evil is done not only by monsters,
but at least as frequently by normal people put in terrible circumstances” (p. 66). This
sentence resonated within me because if we lived in a “black and white” world,
only monsters would do evil; however, we know that this is not the case because
good people sometimes do bad things.
Anyone, when faced with a terrible situation, is capable of engaging in
unethical actions. The key, then, is to try and find ways to avoid these pitfalls. I think that the main way that a person can
attempt to do this is by recognizing that there is an issue in the first
place. Of course there are other steps,
as well, but one must first identify the issue in order to take any further
actions to fix it. These topics made me
think of the hypothetical question that most of us have been asked at one point
or another, which is how a person would behave if they were invisible. Would that person spy on someone? Would that person do good deeds for
strangers? Would that person steal
money? The possibilities are endless,
but the question remains the same: would an invisible person act ethically, even though nobody is watching?
As always, thank you for
visiting my blog. I will be back again next
week! Please leave any comments or
questions that you may have in the section below.
References:
Bowman, J.S. and West, J. P. (2015). Public service ethics: Individual and
institutional responsibilities. Thousand Oaks, CA: CQ Press.
institutional responsibilities. Thousand Oaks, CA: CQ Press.
Angela,
ReplyDeleteI had to opportunity to watch "American Sniper," as well. I have recommended to almost everyone that has mentioned that they wanted to see it. The scene with the little boy attempting the shoot the rocket propeller was very intense. You could tell through his emotions that he did not want to kill the little kid. The choices that he had to make to end the lives of others just to save the lives of his men were difficult. I admire the strength and ability that Chris Kyle had in protecting his soldiers. You are so right, everyone needs to check out the movie. Bradley Cooper did an awesome job portraying him. There is clip of the actual Chris Kyle being interviewed on a late night show, you could barely tell them apart at first.