March 31st, 2016 source code

            The complications of moral decision making is a major theme in the development of our characters. This makes for a moral paradox due the ambiguous nature of what is right or wrong. What it seems to come down to in this film is whether the value of one human life is more important than the life of millions.  Through the rationalization of each individual we can see different representation of normative ethics.

            When looking at Captain Colter Stevens as a character, you could say that he mostly represents Ethnic Altruism; which is a form of consequentialism, which says that any action to benefit you is wrong and any action to benefit others is right. This fits his character the most because even though he knows that he wont be benefiting at all personally in letting them use his body, he decides to help them find the bomber anyway. When looking at Colleen as a character you seem more of the instability in the more decision making, it becomes more complicated. For her she must rationalize whether the deceiving of Captain Stevens is worth saving all those lives. She does follow through with deceiving Captain Stevens, which means she falls more in the category of Utilitarianism, which is Kant’s theory that we should do what is best for the most amounts of people. Even though Captain Stevens will continue to have to use his body without his knowledge, she would be saving many lives. Even when looking at more morally ambiguous character such as Dr.Rutledge, he can justify his actions through normative ethics. More specifically he fits into the mold of Ethical egoism. This is the theory that an act is morally right if the total good of any action is favorable towards the agent of the act.  In Dr.Rutledge’s case he fits this criteria in that if the program shows good results then he will get recognition for his program, which we can tell to be of ultimate concern based of his choice to not tell Captain Stevens that they were going to wipe his mind and restart it again instead of letting him die. While Colleen justified this action because it helped the most amounts of people, Dr, Rutledge justified it due to the personal reward that it will bring him. Even though they both produced the same end result.

What can then be concluded by this movie is that the end result of any given moral decision can produce the same result using different normative ethics. They each used the same category of consequentialism but had different focuses in their moral code. Captain Stevens used Ethnic altruism, Colleen used Utilitarianism, and Dr.Rutledge used ethnical egoism. We can also conclude that some of them don’t really line up with our on individual values based of the disproval of certain characters.