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Ethics Goes to the Movies
Movies hold a mirror up to us, portraying the complexities of human reality

through their characters and stories. And they vividly illustrate moral theo-
ries that address questions about how we are to live and what sort of people
we ought to be. In this book, Christopher Falzon uses movies to provide a rich
survey of moral positions as they have emerged through history. These include
the ethics of the ancient world, medieval ethics, Enlightenment and Kantian
ethics, existentialist ethics and the ethics of the other. Each theory is explained
in detail, using a number of examples from the book’s wide selection of mov-
ies. The discussion draws on a range of recent and not-so-recent films, from
Hollywood blockbusters to art-house cinema.
Key Features
•• In addition to covering thinkers one would expect in an introduction to

ethics (e.g., Plato, Aristotle, Kant), the book discusses less canonical figures
in detail as well (e.g., Marcuse, Foucault, Habermas).
•• Similarly, the book examines both major ethical theories (e.g., Kantianism,
utilitarianism, virtue ethics) and theories too often glossed over in introduc-
tory texts (e.g., Stoicism, Epicureanism, Habermas’s discourse ethics and
Nietzschean ethics).
•• A wide range of movies are discussed, from Hollywood blockbusters and
classics like The Dark Knight, Casablanca and Dirty Harry to lesser known
films like Force Majeure and Under the Skin.
•• At the end of each chapter a focus on two feature films is included, with a
plot summary and interpretations of several key scenes with a time marker
indicating when in the film the scenes occur.
•• A Filmography includes all movies discussed in the book and a Glossary covers
key philosophical terms and figures; both with corresponding page numbers.
Christopher Falzon is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of

Newcastle, Australia. He is the author of Foucault and Social Dialogue (1998)
and Philosophy Goes to the Movies (3rd edition, 2014), and the co-editor of
Foucault and Philosophy (2010) and A Blackwell Companion to Foucault (2013).
Ethics Goes to the Movies
An Introduction to Moral Philosophy
Christopher Falzon
First published 2019
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 Taylor & Francis
The right of Christopher Falzon to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-93819-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-93820-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-67580-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Rear Window Ethics 1

What Is Ethics? 4
Film as Experimental 7
Exploring Ethics Through Film 9
1 Excess and Obsession: Ancient Ethics 15

Why Be Moral? 16
Plato’s Moral Theory 22
Aristotle and Virtue Ethics 34
Stoicism 44
Epicureanism 48
Feature Films: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Under the Skin 56
2 Sin and Self-Denial: Religious Ethics 63

Divine Command 64
Augustine 69
Aquinas and Natural Law 76
The Problem of Evil 84
Feature Films: Crimes and Misdemeanors, and The Addiction 90
3 Pleasure, Happiness and Rights: Enlightenment Ethics 96

Hobbes and the Social Contract 96
Enlightenment and Happiness 105
Utilitarianism 110
Locke and Rights 124
The Libertine and Scientific Morality 129
Feature Films: Dirty Harry, and The Dark Knight 135
vi Contents
4 Personhood and Autonomy: Kantian Ethics 142
Duty and Desire 142
Persons 154
Autonomy 165
Marx 168
Habermas and Discourse Ethics 182
Feature Films: High Noon, and No Country for Old Men 191
5 Slaves, Supermen and Authentic Selves: Existentialist Ethics 197

Nietzsche 198
Kierkegaard 211
Twentieth-Century Existentialism: Sartre et al. 214
The Social Situation: de Beauvoir 224
Feature Films: Rope, and Fight Club 231
6 Encounters with Aliens: Ethics and the Other 237

The Critique of ‘Traditional’ Ethics 237
The Ethics of Care 242
Levinas, Ethics and the Other 248
Foucault, Power and Ethics 255
Experiments in Living 262
Feature Films: Casablanca, and Force Majeure 266
Filmography 273
Glossary 277
Bibliography 288
Index 300
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my colleagues William Herfel, Joe Mintoff, Michael Newton,
Timothy O’Leary, Sarah Rice and Tim Stanley who were kind enough to read
through various chapters and to give me the benefit of their special expertise; Tim
Madigan and an anonymous reviewer for their tremendously helpful comments
on the text as a whole; Penny Craswell for casting her expert eye over the text and
saving it from all sorts of inelegancies; and Andy Beck, my editor at Routledge,
for his ongoing support and patience. This book is dedicated to Penny Craswell,
who has also been very patient.
Introduction
Rear Window Ethics
‘We’ve become a race of peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside
their own house and look in for a change. Yes, sir. How’s that for a bit of home-
spun philosophy?’ So says visiting insurance nurse Stella about the activities of
her charge, L.B. ‘Jeff’ Jefferies, in Hitchcock’s classic Rear Window. Wheelchair-
bound with a broken leg, cooped up with nothing to do, he has taken to passing the
time by staring out of the rear window of his apartment, watching the neighbours
in his block go about their lives. As is well-known, Rear Window unfolds as a
murder mystery as Jeff tries to work out if the bedridden woman across the way
has been murdered by her husband. But the film also includes some reflection on
what Jeff himself is doing in the film. Stella is sure that there’s something prob-
lematic about Jeff’s obsessive neighbour-watching. She thinks that those who
indulge in such activity really ought to stop and think about what they are doing.
Even Jeff comes to wonder about his activity, at least for a moment. As he says
later to his girlfriend Lisa, who has her own concerns, ‘I wonder if it’s ethical to
watch a man with binoculars, and a long-focus lens … Do you suppose it’s ethical
even if you prove he didn’t commit a crime? As Lisa says, it’s a question of ‘rear
window ethics’.
So, ethical reflection is coming into this film at a number of levels. Stella
and Lisa wonder about the ethics of Jeff’s behaviour, as does he. In addition, the
viewer may have their own thoughts about Jeff’s activity. Is all this surveillance
justified in the interests of solving a crime or is that simply an excuse to look? Is
Jeff a detective or a pervert, or perhaps a bit of both? And these are interesting
questions for the viewer to consider since Rear Window can readily be seen as
offering a metaphor for cinema and movie-watching. The scenes in the apartment
windows are like silent movies. Jeff himself is very much like a moviegoer, the
immobilised watcher who watches, unseen, in the dark. For their part, the mov-
iegoer is able to secretly go places and watch things that they would not ordinarily
be able to in real life. In considering the ethics of Jeff’s activities, the viewer is
also in a position to think about the ethics of their own movie-watching activity.
Is watching movies a form of voyeurism? Can it amount to the violation or exploi-
tation of those being watched? These concerns and questions notwithstanding,
2 Introduction
everyone involved in Rear Window is completely absorbed in the activity they
are raising questions about. Whatever his misgivings, Jeff can’t tear himself away
from the window; and despite their initial concerns, Stella and Lisa are quickly
drawn into Jeff’s surveillance activities. And so, of course, are the film’s view-
ers. As Pauline Kael pointed out many years ago, it is precisely ‘the opening into
other, forbidden or surprising kinds of experience’ that draws viewers to the mov-
ies in the first place (Kael 1970, 105).
If what the film is showing us provokes ethical questions and concerns in char-
acters and viewers alike, the viewer is also, uniquely, in a position to use the film
to explore these ethical views and concerns, to interrogate them in the light of
the film experience. This book is a more extended and systematic version of that
exercise. It is an introduction to ethical thinking, in particular the kind of system-
atic ethical thinking that has been undertaken for centuries by philosophers. And
it makes use of some recent and not-so-recent films to illustrate and explore some
of the key theories, arguments and problems that have emerged in the history of
ethics. I should say that using film for the purpose of exploring various aspects
of philosophy is not an especially novel thing to do. Films, along with television,
have enjoyed a good deal of popularity in recent years as an avenue for talking
about philosophical positions and issues. There are many books that have gone
down this avenue, including a number of excellent introductions to ethics. What
this book does that might be new is to take this approach in relation to an entire
history of ethical thinking.
Considering ethical thinking historically means that there is a progression
of ideas to consider, and a natural logic to the ordering of the ideas, since later
accounts respond to, contend with or distance themselves from earlier ones. But
we are not simply visiting a dusty museum of superseded thoughts. The history
of ethical thinking is also a history of the present, insofar as these ideas continue
to speak to and inform contemporary ways of thinking. And films are a useful
medium to employ in exploring the contemporary relevance of these ideas because
films are inevitably contemporary in their content and references. This is not to
forget all the changes in context, outlook and style that have occurred over the last
hundred years or so of film history. For all that, film remains a modern art. Even
history films have to speak to and resonate with modern audiences, which is why
they can so readily introduce anachronistic elements into their portrayals of his-
torical figures and events. A film like Agora, for example, might be seen as reading
the early modern confrontation between science and dogmatic religion back into
the confrontation between classical antiquity and a rising Christianity. Even in this,
the film is providing a measure of how certain ideas and viewpoints have become a
part of contemporary ways of thinking. And in using films to talk about views that
have emerged in the history of ethical thinking, one has a measure not only of how
far these historical views continue to speak to contemporary experience, but also
how these views have entered into and become part of that experience.
This is not to reduce the films being discussed here to no more than means for
talking about ethics. First, any use of films to talk about ethics is at the same time
a way of talking about the films. Seeing a character or their actions as providing
Introduction 3
an illustration or instantiation of some ethical view or concept is already a way of
thinking about what is going on in the film. Moreover, ethical views or ideas may
be invoked or alluded to in the film by the characters themselves in talking about
other characters or themselves. This makes talking about these views very much
a matter of talking about the film. Beyond this, the film is going to be more than
just a means for discussing ethics simply because talking about a film in terms of
its philosophical or ethical relevance can never really exhaust what is going on in
the film. A film is not an ethical treatise, a philosophical work. It has a life of its
own and there will always be more going on in it than the illustration or instantia-
tion of ethical views. There will be the story to get on with, and lives to portray,
and non-philosophical concerns, artistic, dramatic or comic concerns are going to
come into play in terms of what is being presented.
By the same token, that a film has a life of its own, and will be governed
significantly by non-philosophical concerns, is not incompatible with a film hav-
ing philosophical or ethical content. It would be odd to argue that films, simply
by virtue of having non-philosophical concerns, are unable to engage with such
content. Indeed, this can be expressed more positively: that a film is irreducible to
any philosophical or ethical ideas it might illustrate or instantiate arguably means
that there is room in film for a critical engagement with these ideas. Certainly, a
film may be set up to do little more than promote a certain viewpoint or way of
thinking. There are plenty of didactic, moralistic and propagandistic films of this
sort. But films can also reflect on and challenge the perspectives and positions
they portray in various ways, through playfulness, irony, even downright subver-
sion (see Stam 2000, 139; Wilson 1986, 13). And it can be very much part of their
artistry, drama or comedy that they do so.
So, the suggestion is that reflection on philosophical or ethical ideas might
take place through the workings of a film, which is able to portray these ideas in
various lights, positive or negative. The philosophical text is not the only context
in which such critical reflection can take place. Admittedly, this book does not
go too far down this path. That is, it does not seek to explore how a film might be
philosophical or ethical in its own right, without in any way serving to illustrate
or engage with philosophical or ethical positions in the literature. No doubt, like
Hitchcock’s notion of pure cinema, there is pure film-philosophy, pure cinematic
ethics. This is not the concern of the present book. The overriding purpose here
remains that of introducing ethical positions from the history of ethical thinking,
so the films remain to that degree subordinated to the philosophy. Nonetheless,
films are not subordinate insofar as they have resources to reflect on any ethical
views they might be thought to illustrate or instantiate, to interrogate them even
as they portray them. These ideas are not only concretely illustrated in the films
but also, in being refracted through the lens of cinematic experience, are able to
be studied from a number of different angles.
The aim here as mentioned is to use films to talk about an entire history of
ethics. That a historical film can readily introduce anachronistic elements into its
picture of the past reminds us that any history is going to be, to some extent, a
‘history of the past in terms of the present’. One can safely assume that the history
4 Introduction
of ethical thinking is far messier than what is being portrayed in this book, which
is a more or less smooth and continuous progression from ancient thinking to
recent ethical thought. But in the end, the same could probably be said of any his-
tory. This does not necessarily make the history wrong, only necessarily partial. It
should just be kept in mind that the history of ethics being presented here is not the
whole story. Apart from anything else, there are some glaring omissions, such as
Emotivism and other ethical views from twentieth-century analytic philosophy; as
well as the moral views of Pragmatist figures like John Dewey. Most obviously,
it is very much a story of one tradition of ethical thinking only, namely, Western
ethical thinking. It has nothing to say about non-Western ethics. And with regard
to the discussion of religious ethics, the religion is restricted to the Christianity
that happened to become dominant in the West in the medieval period.
What Is Ethics?
I have been referring rather vaguely to ethical thinking and to unspecified ethical
theories, positions, views and ideas that we will be exploring. Before proceed-
ing any further, it will be useful to consider what might be understood by the
notion of ethics. No special distinction is being made between ethics and morality
here. One term comes from the Greek (ethos) and the other from Latin (mores),
meaning customs, manners or social norms. And while there are of course ethical
theories, and a history of such theories, ethics is not something we encounter first
as abstract theory, ‘moral philosophy’, a branch of philosophy. Rather it is in the
first instance something utterly practical, very much part of everyday life. One
does not need to be a philosopher to be acquainted with it. Living a life is enough.
Ethics here is thinking about how we should live that life and what sort of person
we ought to be. And the ethical dimension of everyday life is the more or less
organised framework of norms, values and commitments that embody our sense of
how we ought to live, the sort of life we aspire to, in terms of which we ordinarily
think about what to do, make our decisions and act.
A life without such a framework, in which we just did whatever we were
moved to do by immediate wants and desires, would be at the very least an under-
developed one. Very young children might qualify. They are not yet responsible
moral agents, able to play a role in the dramas of life. But while some adults do
of course act childishly, a framework of norms and values is not something moral
agents can easily do without. We cannot lead our lives without making choices
that show we think that some things are more important than others. Ordinarily,
we are committed to being a certain sort of person, to living a certain kind of life;
and this requires us to adhere to a framework of justification and criticism, the
‘horizon of evaluation’ in terms of which we reflect and weigh up the choices
and actions we undertake. This set of commitments and values is central to who
we are, our ‘identity’. Such an orienting framework is necessary if we are to be
agents at all. To lose it would not amount to a liberation but a terrifying experi-
ence of disintegration. It would be precisely an ‘identity crisis’, a breakdown, a
catastrophic loss of orientation. In such a state, we would no longer know where
Introduction 5
we stood, how to choose, what actions to pursue and we would be crippled as
agents (see Taylor 1985a, 34–35).
Thus, ethics, understood as a set of values or ideals concerning how to live that
goes beyond mere survival, is not an optional extra but an essential part of being
a functioning human being, a responsible moral agent. It defines who one is and
where one stands in the world, and at the same time, what one aspires to or tran-
scends oneself towards. Whatever particular form it takes, ethics always involves
some form of self-transcendence or self-overcoming. We can equally say that it
is a distinguishing mark of human beings that they are the creatures for whom the
ethical question can arise: how should I live? What kind of life do I want? (Malik
2014, 184). While this is the kind of question one might associate particularly
with twentieth-century existentialism, it would be better to say that existentialism
is the philosophy especially concerned with asking this distinctively human ques-
tion. It is also the question that was especially important to the Greeks, right at the
beginning of systematic moral reflection. Socrates, in Plato’s Republic says that
‘we are discussing no small matter, but how we ought to live’. It is not perhaps the
kind of question that can be associated so readily with modern moral philosophy
to the extent that the latter has been a highly theoretical exploration of grounds or
basic principles underlying moral judgements.
So, ethics is not in the first instance a matter of philosophical theory, but some-
thing to be lived. As James Griffin suggests, ethics in this sense of a lived ethics
appears early in the life of a culture (Griffin 2015, 1). As a culture develops, roles
are established that involve adherence to particular norms of behaviour. And indi-
viduals are inculcated into that culture, developing as individuals in the process
insofar as they imbibe its norms in the course of socialisation. They are then able to
take part in that society, play various roles within it, participate in its dramas. This
is not to say that life is simply the slavish reproduction of pre-existing formulae, of
the customary ways of doing things that we may have absorbed from our culture.
Otherwise, morality would never change or evolve. But nor however are we ever
completely our own creation, however much we might like to imagine ourselves so.
We inevitably acquire some kind of ethical framework for living from our culture
in the course of growing up, in the process of becoming who we are. However, this
ethical apparatus is also something that gets put to the test in the course of living,
sometimes being modified or even coming completely undone in the process.
What about the various philosophical theories of ethics, the history of which
is the subject of this book? These ethical theories are not entirely distinct from
lived ethics, but rather, parasitic upon it. What usually happens is that philoso-
phers come along and try to provide lived ethics with foundations, to discern
what characterises or underpins moral judgements, to bring ethics under a set of
simple rules or principles. What these days is known as normative ethical theory
aims to produce some kind of coherent, systematic account of what makes moral
judgements correct, in terms of some fundamental principle that defines a feature
common to all correct moral judgements. On the basis of some such principle,
philosophers have been inspired to justify, affirm and also criticise, even try to
reform, existing values, norms and ways of behaving.
6 Introduction
But it is important to stress that ethics does not wait for philosophers to provide
it with theoretical foundations. That sort of theorising happens after the event,
the event being the moral training that starts in early childhood. Equally, a con-
nection to life is necessary even for the most general ethical theory. Sometimes
these theories claim to rely on intuitions about the nature of the good, access to
divine revelation or the deliverances of pure reason in order to arrive in an a priori
manner at principles that can provide a foundation for lived ethics. But however
it might be arrived at, a general theory of ethics without any intrinsic reference to
life would be empty and irrelevant. Equally, no matter how abstract, ethical theo-
ries generally involve some idea of how to live, bound up with a broad conception
of what it is to be a human being and also of the larger world in which one exists.
Even a highly theoretical account like that of the eighteenth-century philosopher
Kant in the end exhorts us to live a certain way, to be what we are, namely rational
beings whose reason lifts us above nature, and to never fall below that to become
a mere thing, pushed around by natural forces.
Nonetheless, it is an occupational hazard for theoretical accounts that in their
efforts to systematise lived ethics, or to subordinate it to simple rules or princi-
ples, life can end up being subordinated to theory, leaving us with an ethics that
is unliveable, and hence inhuman. How else could there emerge such improbably
superhuman figures as the entirely rational Kantian agent, or for that matter, the
god-like Stoic sage or the all-knowing utilitarian calculator? This inhumanity is
a problem for an ethical theory. As one commentator puts it, ‘if ethics retreats to
a fantasy world, providing dictates that could guide only the infinitely rational,
impartial, all-knowing agent, then it loses its interest and value to our societies’
(Hayward 2017). It is an at least necessary condition for any conception of how
we ought to live that it is physically and psychologically possible for human
beings to live in the way prescribed.
It is true that ethics involves the aspiration to certain ideals of behaviour. To
that extent it is a form of transcendence, of going beyond or overcoming one-
self. And every person who aspires to be a certain sort of person, to live a certain
life, engages in this transcendence. This is why a moral agent cannot be reduced
to a thing, and ethics cannot be exhaustively accounted for in purely objective,
scientific terms. But nor can we entirely transcend our bodies, become pure
subjects. The physical and psychological capacities of human beings always
have a bearing on ethical life. Perhaps some people can rise higher than others,
so we cannot judge what human beings are capable of just by what the ‘ordi-
nary person’ can manage. But whatever the case, none of us can aspire to what
is physically or psychologically beyond human beings as such. This suggests
that the constraints on ethics are ultimately practical. Ethics should concern
itself with what falls within the limits of human capacity (see Hayward 2017).
A theory-driven ethics that is not ultimately grounded in human life and what
human beings are capable of achieving is not only of no positive use or value.
It can indeed be positively dangerous. It can become a tool for terrorising life,
a basis for tormenting or brutalising people insofar as they fall short, as they
inevitably must, of the impossible ethical ideal.
Introduction 7
Film as Experimental
If ethical positions have a fundamental connection to the practical, and to what
people are capable of doing in practice, they are not immune from being put to the
test of experience, the practical experience of living. For a lived ethics, merely to
live is to put oneself to the test. And what is being put to the test in these ‘experi-
ments in living’, to borrow a notion from John Stuart Mill, is not some hypothesis
or theory, but we ourselves, as defined by the values or ideals that constitute our
identity as moral agents.
Most straightforwardly, we can be put to the test as moral agents simply by
encountering challenging circumstances, which concretely pose the question of
whether we are able to live up to our defining ideals in practice. These are not
experiments concerned with exploring human biology or psychology, but with
human beings as moral subjects; though once again, human biology and psychol-
ogy have a role to play since they provide the capacities we have to work with as
moral beings and the ultimate constraints on the sort of person we can be. Further,
if even general ethical theories and positions have to have some connection to the
practical and can only require of people what they are capable of doing if they
are going to be meaningful, they are similarly not immune from the test of expe-
rience. If an ethical theory was to formulate an ideal of conduct that could only
be attained by a superhuman being, and which no ordinary human being could
live up to in practice, that would be a significant problem for the theory. To that
extent, even abstract moral theories are at risk of disconfirmation in the light of
experience and the experiment of trying to live the theory in practice affords us
the opportunity to reflect on the theory in question.
Experiments in living are intrinsically dangerous in the sense that they expose
us to the possibility of failure. Most straightforwardly, there is the risk of falling
short of our defining ideals in practice. The stakes in such experiments are not
simply epistemological. Failure to conform to expectations represents not just dis-
confirmation but self-betrayal, an occasion for guilt, embarrassment and humili-
ation – not to mention an opportunity for lying and self-deception as one tries to
preserve one’s conception of oneself, and one’s estimation in the eyes of others.
The connections between experiment, experience and danger are reflected in the
very language we use. Experiment and experience once meant the same thing, and
they share the Latin root expereri (to try, to test), which is itself linked to the word
for danger (periculum).
We can, however, envisage experiments in living in which we are removed
from the lives being lived and the risks this experimentation entails. We can
envisage hypothetical scenarios, fictional stories or narratives, which provide an
occasion for reflecting in an extended way on possible forms of life and views
about how one should live. Being fictional here does not amount to being false,
only to that which is ‘fictioned’, that is, fabricated or constructed (see O’Leary
2009, 86–88). This is one way of thinking about the function of the fictive arts,
including films as a contemporary art form. Like novels and plays, films can be
seen as offering experimental scenarios in which moral agents, ideals and views
8 Introduction
of life can be explored and tested. Narrative film seems particularly well-placed
to run such virtual experiments. It is an art form that engages directly with expe-
rience, that confronts the viewer in a visceral way, as well as being able to por-
tray relatable characters with some structure of values, ideals and commitments,
experimental subjects able to be put to the test.
With respect to ethical theories, these as noted must also have some connec-
tion with the practical. They have to be able to be lived in practice. So even a
highly theoretical account like Kant’s exhorts us to live a certain way, to live up
to a certain ideal of conduct, to be a certain kind of character. As such, through
characters, actions and lives that illustrate or embody them, ethical theories can
be concretely portrayed in film; and we can also ask critical questions about them.
The question might be posed for example as to whether it is possible in practice
for human beings to live up to the ideal of how to live, or be the kind of ideal char-
acter, that is envisioned in the theory. Or we might consider how far a complex
human and moral reality that is being portrayed in the film can be captured by the
theory. And it may be that the theory is going to be found wanting or inadequate
when put to the test of experience in these ways.
Of course, a film can also be questioned in connection with the ideas and posi-
tions that it portrays. Insofar as the film invokes a theoretical view or position, the
position may be misconstrued or oversimplified. As an instance, Nietzsche, part
of whose ‘posthumous life’ has been in the movies, and one of the few philoso-
phers to make regular appearances there, is regularly misrepresented. Aside from
this, a film may portray undeveloped characters and contrived, unrealistic scenar-
ios. It may recycle well-worn cinematic conventions and stock characters, so that
in the end it only references other films, a movie universe with movie heroes and
villains. Or it may uncritically take on and amplify conventional views circulat-
ing through the culture that offers a mythological or ideologically distorted view
of the world or of ourselves. In this role, the film acts as no more than a means of
perpetuating these views and is essentially part of the problem. But while films
may be constructed to do no more than confirm, reproduce and reinforce prevail-
ing myths, they are also able to invoke aspects of our experience that resist and
go beyond such representations, reminding us that experience that is richer, more
diverse or more complex than these representations allow. In so doing, they can
challenge not only those cultural myths but also film’s sometime complicity in
perpetuating them. This is the experimental film as both cultural critique and cin-
ematic self-critique.
Film understood as experimental, in this broad sense of offering a narrative
through which characters, ethical positions or forms of thinking can be critically
examined, explored and tested, has affinities with the thought experiments found
within philosophical texts. These too are fictional narratives, hypothetical scenar-
ios offering a mode of critical reflection. That is an aspect that some film philoso-
phers have emphasised, arguing that it makes sense to think of some fiction films
as working in ways that philosophical thought experiments do, questioning exist-
ing views, posing counter-examples, exploring what is essential to a concept and
Introduction 9
so on; and in that regard, as not only capable of illustrating philosophical ideas
and themes, but of ‘doing philosophy’ (Wartenberg 2007, 67). However, there are
also some significant differences between film and philosophical thought experi-
ments, one being that film is more emphatically invested in experience. Whereas
the philosophical thought experiment is austere and sketchy, the film narrative is
richly detailed. Where philosophical experiments focus on concepts rather than
people, and don’t engage the audience, cinematic narratives give access to con-
duct, characters and extended stories involving the audience in their characters’
lives and fate. And unlike even literary narratives, films do not merely describe
but show things in detail, especially faces, gestures and conduct, communicating
their significance directly.
These differences have led some to argue that there are too many disanalo-
gies for film to be understood as philosophising or reflecting in this way (see
Wartenberg 2011, 19–21). But rather than trying to judge film in terms of the
narrow model of the philosophical thought experiment, it seems more fruitful to
argue that the differences film as film brings to the table, particularly the ability to
show experience in a richly detailed way, enhance its capacity to engage in narra-
tive experimentation, to invoke challenging experiences, in ways that go beyond
what is possible within the philosophical text. As Damien Cox and Michael
Levine put it, through its relative richness of detail, film can ‘sometimes provide
nuanced investigation of fundamental features of experience well beyond the ordi-
nary achievements of written philosophical texts, and in doing so robustly refute
hollow and simplistic ways of understanding life’ (Cox and Levine 2012, 12).
In other words, film precisely as film is well placed to present experimental sce-
narios in which moral theories and forms of understanding can be put to the test of
experience. And the experiment in question is not the abstract thought experiment
but the concrete experiment in living.
Exploring Ethics Through Film

In this book, then, we will be turning to a range of films to illustrate and explore
key theories, arguments and problems in the history of ethics. What will con-
tinually be to the forefront, even with respect to abstract ethical theory, is how
these positions address the question of how we are to live and what sort of per-
son we should be. This way of thinking about ethics is very different from the
‘metaethics’ that was the focus of much twentieth-century moral philosophy in
the analytic tradition. Metaethics, theorising about moral theorising, asks very
general philosophical questions about moral knowledge, such as: can we have
moral knowledge, can we know what is right or wrong, or is morality a matter
of personal opinion, a purely subjective affair? And if we can have knowledge of
what is right and wrong, how do we acquire it? It also asks about the meaning of
various moral terms, such as good or evil, right or wrong; and about the nature
of justification in ethics, questions such as: how do we justify moral judgements,
how do we justify thinking that a particular judgement is right or wrong?
10 Introduction
Metaethics is evidently at some distance from any practical concerns about
how to live. This is not to say that meta-ethical themes will be absent from this
book. However, dealing with them in a separate section runs the risk of compound-
ing this remoteness and ending up with a very abstract discussion. Accordingly,
any meta-ethical questions will be addressed in a way that is integrated into the
discussion of the various ethical theories and positions. The discussion in the
book will primarily take the form of a survey of moral theories and positions
as they have emerged historically, from ancient to medieval to modern thought.
These theories and positions will be given a relatively detailed examination, and
narrative fiction films will be drawn on in order to illustrate and explore these
positions. At the end of each chapter, two of the films that have made an appear-
ance in the discussion, a classic film and a more recent one, will be given a more
systematic examination, with an outline of their plot, identification of key scenes
with timings and an indication of the themes that the films address. At the end
of the book there is a filmography and a glossary of the main ethical notions and
thinkers appearing in the book.
What follows is a ‘preview of coming attractions’, as Lisa from Rear Window
might put it: a quick survey of the various ethical positions we will be looking at
in the book, along with the elements of film form that seem especially relevant
to their portrayal and exploration. We will begin in Chapter One with the ethical
thinking of ancient Greece and Rome, of Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus and Epicurus
amongst others. Here, the central ethical notion is virtue, the morally praisewor-
thy quality of character; and the ideal is to have a character that embodies the
various virtues. The different ethical accounts of the ancient world seek to give
some kind of reflective account of the virtues, what they are and why they are
important to pursue, usually tying them to some notion of human nature. They
agree in holding that being virtuous is bound up with achieving happiness, in the
sense of fulfilment or well-being. The various films used to discuss these notions
provide narratives through which they can be portrayed and explored. To make
use of narratives in this way is very much to follow in the footsteps of Plato.
Right at the start of systematic reflection on ethics, Plato makes conspicuous use
of literary narratives, thought experiments, little stories like the ring of Gyges and
the Myth of the Cave, in his dialogues. Through these narratives he contemplates
various philosophical questions, such as the nature of morality, even the nature of
philosophical enlightenment itself.
Ironically, Plato is also the thinker who wants to exclude narratives from
philosophy. He wants to establish the narrative that philosophy arises through
the rejection of narrative, the old Greek myths, in favour of a rational discourse
devoted to universal truths (see Derrida 1993; Wartenberg 2007, 21). In this spirit,
he will ban the epic poets, the artists, from the ideal society he portrays in the
Republic. He thus introduces an opposition between philosophy and the fictive
arts that continues to colour thinking about the relationship between philosophy
and film. But he also succeeds despite himself in showing how fictional narratives
might be useful for exploring philosophical and ethical matters. The narratives
portrayed in the Cave-like space of the modern cinema are no exception to this.
Introduction 11
Films to be discussed in connection with ancient Greek and Roman ethics include
monster movies, movies of excess and obsession, and Jane Austen adaptations:
Under the Skin, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Blue Velvet, Scarface, Goodfellas, Wall
Street, The Wolf of Wall Street, Vertigo, Mulholland Drive, Pride and Prejudice
and Sense and Sensibility, amongst others.
In Chapter Two, we turn to religious ethics, specifically that based on the
Christianity that emerged as the classical world declined and remained central
to the Western outlook until the end of the medieval period. In this way of
thinking, virtue and self-perfection remain important, but it is virtue grounded
in a transcendental God, and which is a means to the end of becoming one with
this figure. Here, morality as a set of God-given rules for living points towards
a transcendental ideal beyond this world, beyond ordinary life and comprehen-
sion. With narrative films that help to explore religious ethics, what is of par-
ticular relevance is that film tells its stories by way of cinematic images, the
potent combinations of sight and sound specific to the medium. These provide
the opportunity not only for film to tell its stories in a distinctively visual way
but also, if the image comes to be given primacy over narrative coherence,
to create emotional and visceral significance that transcends narrative mean-
ing (see Vass 2005). Amongst other things, the image that transcends narrative
can be used to evoke transcendental, even mystical religious experiences that
go beyond the ordinary world of narrative logic, producing a direct emotional
effect in the viewer. The ‘surveying God’s creation’ sequence in The Tree of
Life represents an extended example. Films to be considered in connection with
religious ethics include biblical epics and more quietly religious films, as well
as meditations on murder, identity, death and loss: The Passion of Joan of Arc,
Babette’s Feast, Noah, Frailty, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Match Point, The
Crying Game, Shadowlands and The Tree of Life.
Chapter Three brings us to the ethics of the early modern era, the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries primarily, with figures like Hobbes, Holbach, Bentham
and Mill coming to the fore. Here, God is no longer the basis for ethics, which is
now understood to be grounded in human beings. Human beings themselves are
understood in a down-to-earth, naturalistic way, as creatures driven to seek pleas-
ure and to avoid pain. This view of the human being emerges out of the new scien-
tific world-view, a thoroughly ‘disenchanted’, no-nonsense view of nature, based
on unprejudiced observation and experiment rather than dogma and traditional
belief. On this view, human beings are not fundamentally different from any other
object in the natural world, and equally the product of natural forces. So whereas
in the older religious picture, human beings were subservient to a transcendent
God, in the new scientific picture, human beings are subservient to nature, and in
particular to their own nature as pleasure-driven animals.
There is a parallel with film here. Beyond the combination of narrative and
cinematic image, film can also be seen as a combination of the constructed and the
photographic. As we have seen, the cinematic image can express something out of
this world, but it can also be understood as photographically capturing the utterly
down-to-earth. Film theorist V.F. Perkins offers a general description of the film
12 Introduction
medium in these terms: ‘the fiction film exploits the possibilities of synthesis
between photographic realism and dramatic illusion’. For Perkins, film’s con-
quest of the visual world ‘extends in two opposite directions. The first … gives it
the power to “possess” the real world by capturing its appearance. The second …
permits the representation of an ideal image, ordered by the film-maker’s will
and imagination’ (Perkins 1972, 60). The documentary and the cartoon or fan-
tasy film occupy the purely reproductive and purely imaginative extremes respec-
tively, with the photographic narrative film standing in a compromise position
between them. The aim of the narrative film is still to present a reality, but the
film’s realism depends on the completeness of its illusion, the coherence of its
fictioned world, story and characters, and the invisibility of its visual style. Here,
the cinematic image is subordinated to the telling of the story, the vehicle through
which the narrative content is made visible.
In as much as the film’s narrative is organised around a central protagonist
who motivates the story, the world that it shows is oriented towards revealing
the character’s journey, struggle or development. As such, film is able to portray
a narrative space that is both a photographically captured reality and shaped by
the character’s viewpoint and concerns. However, the camera can also detach
itself from the protagonist’s point of view, revealing a world that is altogether
outside their viewpoint, potentially undercutting it or highlighting its limitations.
When this latter aspect is in the ascendant we have unembellished, almost anthro-
pological films, unsentimentally recording human behaviour from an objective
point of view. This allows characters to be presented largely as victims of their
nature or circumstances, driven by compelling impulses or environmental factors.
Such films are useful in the exploration of early modern forms of ethics, such
as utilitarianism, which similarly presuppose a scientific view of the world, in
which human beings are seen as natural objects driven by impulses and shaped by
environmental factors. Relevant films here include action crime thrillers and super-
hero movies, anthropological films and comedies: Dirty Harry, LA Confidential,
I, Robot, The Dark Knight, The Lord of the Flies, Wild Child, Educating Rita and
Simon of the Desert.
In Chapter Four, we come to Kant’s moral thinking, which arises partly in reac-
tion to the scientific ethics of the eighteenth century. For Kant, the human being
is not primarily a natural object, determined by external forces, but an active,
organising subject. Moral rules are generated by human beings, through their own
rationality, which is what lifts them above nature. Kant’s vision of the heroic
individual was in turn developed by his nineteenth-century successors into a com-
prehensive vision of history as a story of humanity’s self-development, towards a
social existence rationally organised with ‘will and consciousness’. Again, there
is a parallel with cinema in the manner in which film involves not only photo-
graphic realism but also the construction of a dramatic illusion, an ideal image
‘ordered by the film-maker’s will and imagination’. As a constructed r eality, film
is able to portray the world from the point of view of its protagonists, as a nar-
rative oriented around their development, informed by their subjectivity. To that
extent, they are not victims of their nature or circumstances. Even in the face of a
Introduction 13
hostile world, even if they are entirely alone and without support, they are able to
make a stand. Films to be discussed in relation to Kant and his successors include
a number of westerns and science fiction films: High Noon, 3:10 to Yuma, The
Searchers, No Country for Old Men, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Blade Runner,
Blade Runner 2049, Ex Machina, Fahrenheit 45 and Alphaville.
In Chapter Five, we will turn to ethics as it appears in two other nineteenth-
century thinkers, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and their successors the twentieth-
century existentialists, Sartre and de Beauvoir. In existentialist ethics, even more
emphatically than with Kant, the focus is on the individual subject and ethical
values are understood to be freely created by this subject. For Nietzsche, the crea-
tion of values is the task of the ‘supermen’, the strong few. For the existentialists
what is required of all individuals is that they be ‘authentic’, that they acknowl-
edge their freedom and responsibility for themselves. Existentialist philosophy
seeks to emphasise human subjectivity and freedom in the face of forms of think-
ing that deny subjectivity and view human beings as mere objects. Beyond the
narrative and the image, the constructed and the photographic, a relevant aspect
of film here is its capacity to evoke subjective experience, a personal point of
view. Films make it possible for the viewer to experience a character’s world, the
subjective experience that eludes scientific or objective ways of understanding
life. Existentialism stands against quantifying, impersonal accounts that objectify
human beings and eliminate any trace of subjectivity. In this respect, film is not
only able to portray existentialist themes, but also, like other art-forms such as
literature and plays that were often employed by the existentialists themselves,
can play a direct role in the existentialist effort to preserve the subjective in the
face of objective thinking. Films to be considered here include Nietzschean epics
and films of existential anxiety: Baby Face, Rope, Fight Club, The Matrix, The
Seventh Seal and The Truman Show, amongst others.
In Chapter Six, we turn to what can be termed the ethics of the other, a loose
term to cover various ethical approaches that emerged for the most part in the
twentieth century. These include Gilligan’s feminist ethics of care, Levinas’s eth-
ics of the other, and, it is going to be suggested, Foucault’s ethics. In general,
the ethics of the other means turning away from the modern focus on the sub-
ject, Kant’s heroic individual and the subjectivity of existentialism. This is not,
however, a turn to an ethics based on a transcendental God, or a scientific view
of nature and human nature, but rather, to one based on the other person that the
self encounters in ordinary experience. Instead of the existentialist concern with
having the right relation with oneself, personal authenticity, the focus is now on
having a proper relationship with the other. The problem remains objectification,
but this is now the objectification of the other at the hands of the self. For this
ethics of the other, rather than objectifying the other, reducing them to an instru-
ment for one’s own interests, or absorbing them into the existing categories of
one’s thinking, one needs to acknowledge them in their otherness, care for or take
responsibility for them.
As we have seen, film’s capacity to evoke personal, subjective experi-
ence plays a role in its portrayal of existentialist ethics. Of particular relevance
14 Introduction
for exploring this ethics of the other cinematically is film’s capacity to evoke
non-subjective experience, to ‘open up a sense of otherness in a broad sense,
bringing us into sometimes intimate contact with realities we could not other-
wise conceive’ (Richardson 2010, x). This is Kael’s idea of film as ‘the opening
into other, forbidden or surprising kinds of experience’. In a fundamental sense,
this is experience itself, experience as the ‘limit-transcending, challenging event’,
that conflicts with and disrupts our familiar ways of viewing the world. This sort
of experience can be distinguished from experience in the more mundane sense
of the ‘long term, background experience that we share with our culture and
our time’, the historically dominant manner of viewing the world (see O’Leary
2009, 6–7). Film can certainly present us with the experience of a familiar world
that embodies and confirms all our preconceptions; but it can also bring us face
to face with this other kind of experience, the singular, dangerous experience that
confronts and challenges our thinking, and raises the question of how one ought
to respond to it. Films to be considered in this connection include a number of
war movies, some more science fiction films and a ski movie: Schindler’s List,
Casablanca, The Third Man, Aliens, Children of Men, Being John Malkovich and
Force Majeure.
So much for the preview of coming attractions. We can now move on to the
feature presentation, the exploration of the history of ethical thinking with the
help of film. One final word of warning. In the upcoming discussion of the films,
there will not be any ‘spoiler alerts’. Main plot twists and endings are going to be
discussed throughout the text. With that in mind, let’s start with the exploration
of ancient ethics.
1 Excess and Obsession
Ancient Ethics
In Jonathon Glazer’s 2013 Under the Skin, a remarkable and rather d isturbing
scene unfolds in a quiet, understated way. On a beach, a woman watches a
swimmer emerge from the ocean and walk towards her. The two of them are
alone except for a family further down the beach. The family’s dog is swim-
ming in the rough surf. Suddenly there is the sound of screaming. The dog is
in trouble. A woman is in the water, swimming out, trying to rescue the dog.
Now she is also in trouble. Her husband dives in after her, their baby left on the
beach. The swimmer runs back into the ocean to rescue the husband, who once
brought back to the beach immediately breaks free and goes back into the water
to try to save his wife. The woman with whom the scene began has a different
reaction. She watches the tragedy unfold impassively, with complete indiffer-
ence. Then she walks down to the swimmer, who has returned to the beach and
is lying exhausted on the sand. She picks up a rock and strikes him with it, and
then drags him off the beach, leaving the crying baby to its fate, which is very
likely death from exposure.
The film’s premise is that the woman, played by Scarlett Johansson, is in
reality an alien in a woman’s skin, here to hunt humans, men in particular
(Figure 1.1). The alien predator amongst us is the basis for any number of films.
But what is interesting about Under the Skin is that it seems to depict a genu-
inely alien perspective on the human world. And what characterises the alien-
ness of this perspective is that it is one of absolute amorality, portraying how
things might look if one had no moral concerns at all. The drowning family is of
no concern. The swimmer who heroically tried to rescue them is no more than
a convenient source of food. The baby is a mere detail in the background and
can be left to die. It may be that such amorality is so foreign to ordinary ways
of thinking that it is only really intelligible from the perspective of an alien. But
we can turn this around, look on ourselves as the alien beings for a moment, and
ask why it is that these beings should view things in moral terms. What’s in it
for us? Why should we ‘do the right thing’ rather than just what happens to be
in our interests?
Figure 1.1 The alien on the prowl in Under the Skin (Jonathon Glazer, 2013. Credit: A24/
Photofest).
Why Be Moral?
‘Why be moral?’ is perhaps the ultimate metaethical question. Philosophical
thinking about ethics is typically divided into two areas. Normative ethics is con-
cerned with producing theories about what we ought, morally speaking, to do,
theories that allow us to make substantive moral judgements. Metaethical reflec-
tion asks general questions about the nature of the moral judgements we make and
perhaps the biggest metaethical question is why be moral at all? What reasons are
there for me personally to be moral, even when it does not appear to be in my indi-
vidual interest to do the right thing? And why should people in general be moral,
i.e., why should a society adopt the institution of morality?
In the first instance, it might be thought that we are only moral beings because
if we do not do the right thing, we will be found out and punished. But suppose we
could do whatever we wanted and be sure of getting away with it? What reasons
could we have then for being moral? This is a question that was posed very early in
the history of philosophy by the Ancient Greek philosopher Plato (c.428–347 bce),
in one of his dialogues, The Republic. And he posed the question through a story,
the story of the ring of Gyges, about a shepherd who discovers a ring that enables
him to become invisible. With this power, he is able to seduce the queen, plot with
her to kill the king and take over the kingdom, becoming wealthy and powerful
in the process. He can do all of this without fear of detection or punishment. So
he is in a position to pursue and satisfy all his desires, regardless of moral con-
straints, and he does very well indeed out of it. This raises the question – what
reason could Gyges possibly have for not doing what benefits him, doing what
is in his interests? Why should he bother, under these circumstances, to do the
right thing? As Plato phrases it, why would anyone bother to remain within the
Excess and Obsession 17
boundaries of moral behaviour ‘when he is able to take whatever he wants from
the market-stalls without fear of being discovered, to enter houses and sleep with
whomever he chooses, to kill and release from prison anyone he wants, and gen-
erally to act like a god among men’ (Plato 1993, 260c; using the standardised
pagination for works by Plato)?
The tale of Gyges continues to resonate 2000 years later, although the media
available for storytelling has changed somewhat in the meantime. Fast forward
to the present, and we have a story that would make a reasonable plot for a film,
and that film could be taken to raise similar questions about why one should
bother to act morally. In contemporary cinematic stories, it is likely to be scien-
tists rather than shepherds who discover the secret of invisibility, but this does not
stop events taking a familiar path. Whatever noble aspirations the scientists might
have had at the beginning, once they have this power their aspirations typically
give way to various sorts of wickedness as soon as they realise how much they
can get away with. Films with this theme range from the classic The Invisible Man
(Jack Griffin, 1933), where the chemist (Claude Rains) who has discovered the
invisibility formula resolves to dominate the world through a reign of terror, to the
more recent remake, Hollow Man (Paul Verhoeven, 2000), where the wickedness
that ensues, including voyeurism and murder, is presented in meticulous detail.
You might want to take an optimistic view of these scenarios, highlighting
various mitigating circumstances. Perhaps the scientist behaves badly because
the process that makes them invisible also drives them crazy, as in the original
Invisible Man film. Or perhaps they were simply bad people to begin with, as
in the later version where the main character, Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon),
is shown to have questionable traits like overweening arrogance long before
the invisibility process that turns him into a monster. Given this, perhaps the
bad behaviour of the character who discovers invisibility is not a reflection of
human nature as such, but only the nature of the particular individual involved
or as a result of the invisibility process. This also seems to be the case with
the ring of invisibility that features in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings
(2001–2003) and The Hobbit (2012–2014) films. In these sagas, based on the
J.R.R. Tolkien novels, we do not simply have a magical ring that confers invis-
ibility, as in the Gyges story, but one that exerts an evil force that corrupts
the wearer. Here once again we can blame any bad behaviour on the invis-
ibility process.
But even if we were to accept this, there are other kinds of invisibility where
these considerations don’t arise, and yet the question of why one should bother to
be moral remains. Why do the right thing, for example, if you found that your day
was mysteriously repeating over and over, with the actions of the previous day
erased each time, so that only you remembered them, meaning that you could do
whatever you liked without any real consequences? This is the predicament that
weatherman Phil (Bill Murray) finds himself in Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis,
1993). Although the character is certainly grumpy and cynical, he is not an espe-
cially bad person, even when he has the opportunity to be so. Nonetheless, under
those circumstances, the question inevitably arises – why not be as gluttonous,
lecherous or villainous as you like? Phil’s first response to his situation is very
much like that of a modern-day Gyges. He proclaims: ‘I’m not going to live by
their rules any more’, meaning the rules of ordinary, well-behaved citizens, and
sets out on a night of mayhem.
If Groundhog Day relies on a fantasy device to achieve its state of figurative
invisibility, there are more down-to-earth forms one can consider. What if, like
the perfidious eye doctor in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989),
you have the wealth and social standing to cover up any crimes you might com-
mit, including adultery, fraud, even murder? Or if, in the criminal world, you have
the kind of power that allows you to act with complete impunity, doing whatever
you like without having to worry about public scrutiny or legal prosecution, like
the gangsters Tony Montana in Scarface (Brian de Palma, 1983) or Henry Hill in
Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990). Or suppose you have the kind of financial
clout that allows you to do much the same in the business world, like the busi-
nessmen Gordon Gekko in Wall Street (Oliver Stone, 1987) or the Jordan Belfort
character in The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013). These characters
all raise the question of the moment. Why abide by moral constraints if you have
nothing to lose by doing whatever is in your immediate interests? Why not take
the opportunity to fulfil every wish, no matter how extreme?
If these are all Gyges-like scenarios that have been portrayed and explored in
various films, it is worth adding that film itself might be seen as offering the pros-
pect of unlimited wish-fulfilment for the moviegoer, the satisfaction of any desire
without danger to oneself. Every movie is a virtual world, a hypothetical situation
in which anything that one desires can potentially be realised, at least in visual
terms. Any scenario is possible, and more importantly, can be safely enjoyed by
the film-goer, watching invisibly in the dark. Those in the movie audience, it
turns out, are the original invisible men and women. Naturally, the representative
power of cinema being what it is, the idea of film as an avenue for wish-fulfilment
for the viewer has itself been represented in film, as early as Sherlock Jr (Buster
Keaton, 1924). In the film, Keaton, a lowly film projectionist and hopeless would-
be amateur detective, falls asleep and dreams of entering the film he has been
projecting. Here, he becomes Sherlock Jr, the greatest detective in the world.
Having said that, it is not clear that we always wish for the unlimited satisfac-
tion of our desires, the absence of any moral constraints; or indeed that we look
to films only to gratify our desires, wishes and fantasies. The prospect of there
being no moral constraints, no consequences for transgression, might in fact be a
profoundly disturbing prospect. We might desperately wish for there to be a moral
universe, like the rabbi, Ben (Sam Waterston), in Crimes and Misdemeanours,
who insists that without some kind of moral order that acts of wickedness violate,
the world would be a dark, meaningless and terrifying place. A moral universe
can certainly be portrayed within film, a world where good prospers, and even
if it experiences some reverses along the way, will ultimately prevail over evil;
and where those who do wrong, even if they fail to see the light and join the side
of good by the last act, are at least going to be found out and punished by the
end. There are many films in which an essentially moral world is reassuringly
confirmed in these ways. Indeed, this is pretty much the standard Hollywood
scenario. And there is clearly an appetite for such films, even if part of their
appeal might be the pleasure of seeing the bad guys violating all moral norms and
standards, indulging in all the forbidden appetites, before being inevitably and
properly called to account for their transgressions.
We know however that in real life things don’t always work out this way,
that good does not always prevail and that the bad guys don’t always get their
comeuppance. Indeed, like Gyges, they often do very well. And there are plenty
of ‘realistic’ films that serve to remind us precisely of this. In so doing, they raise
with renewed force the question of why one should be moral. One of the pleas-
ures of Crimes and Misdemeanors is that it is quite conscious of its distance from
the Hollywood moral universe. The main character, the ophthalmologist Judah
Rosenthal (Martin Landau), contrives after some agonising to have his mistress
killed when she threatens to expose their affair and ruin his comfortable life; and
in the end he gets away with it, even prospers by it. It’s a stark repudiation of the
conventional Hollywood story and the film itself comments on this. At the end of
the film, the murderous eye doctor meets the director, playing a failed filmmaker,
at a wedding, and recounts his story in the guise of a possible film plot. Allen’s
character replies that it would be a better story if the murderer was wracked with
guilt and driven to give himself up. The doctor’s reply is that this is what hap-
pens in the movies, not in real life: ‘If you want a happy ending, you should
go see a Hollywood movie’. The film’s ending is astonishingly bleak, and if on
one level it might be regarded as offering a gloomy, pessimistic view of human
nature, it might just as easily be seen as presenting a realistic one, stripped of all
comforting illusions.
A similarly pessimistic, or realistic, vision is evident in Roman Polanski’s neo-
noir Chinatown (1974), which revives forties film noir themes but gives them a
darker twist. In classic film noir like John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941),
society might be corrupt and evil, and the private investigator who brings it to
light may themselves be flawed, but in the end, they usually manage to bring
about some degree of justice. In Chinatown, there is no triumph of any sort. When
LA private eye Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) stumbles on a network of graft, mur-
der and incest, presided over by evil businessman Noah Cross (played by John
Huston, no less), neither he nor the police have the power to do anything about it.
Worse, Gittes himself ends up causing the death of the woman he is trying to pro-
tect from Cross’s predations and Cross escapes any punishment. In a similar way,
the classic western undergoes a reality check in No Country for Old Men (Joel
and Ethan Coen, 2007). The decent western hero who fights for what is right, and
who traditionally triumphs over evil through perseverance and resourcefulness,
appears here in the figure of sheriff Ed Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). However, Bell
finds himself ‘over-matched’ by the new, brutal forms of drug-related crime he
is confronting. He is unable to protect ‘his people’, cowboy-adventurer Lewellyn
Moss (Josh Brolin) or his wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), from retribu-
tion, after Moss happens upon a large amount of money from a drug deal gone
wrong. And he is unable to bring to justice the chief agent of that retribution, the
terrifying hitman Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). In the end, all sheriff Bell can
do is escape into retirement from an evil that he cannot defeat.
As a final variation on this theme, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1989) simul-
taneously foregrounds a standard Hollywood story of good triumphing over evil
and subverts it. On the face of it, the film is a conventional story of evil being
properly punished, as clean-cut hero Jeffrey (Kyle McLachlan) manages in the
end to defeat sadistic gangster Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). But the hero finds
he has affinities with the evil Frank, being similarly drawn to nightclub singer
Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) who represents the prospect of illicit, per-
verse sex. Moreover, the ‘good world’ that Jeffrey leaves and to which he even-
tually returns, represented in the picture-perfect images of the town with which
the film begins and ends, is shown to be an impossible idealisation, a comforting
veneer that hides a much darker reality that is always just below the surface.
Under the manicured lawns, there are hideous insects. If we are going to be real-
istic, we need to acknowledge that wrongdoing is not always found out and pun-
ished, that people can and do get away with evil, and often do very well out of it.
So, is it true that the only reason people adhere to moral standards is because of
fear of being caught and punished otherwise? Or can we give a better answer to
the question of why we should be moral?
One response might be that even if we can avoid external scrutiny and
punishment, we will suffer punishment at our own hands for evil deeds, through
guilt and remorse. On this view it is our conscience that keeps us behaving ethically.
We have an internal moral sense, whether this is something inbuilt or inculcated in
us through our upbringing. However, even if conscience is a psychological reality,
it is certainly possible to imagine it absent. Lack of conscience, the absence of any
moral constraints on one’s actions and a willingness to do whatever furthers one’s
interests, is the familiar mark of the movie psychopath. But it might also be argued
that despite the prevalence of such figures in film, this conscience-less, amoral kind
of outlook is in reality relatively rare in individuals. It is a strange way of being,
marking the conscienceless individual as ‘other’, not like the ordinary human being,
and more appropriately embodied as the mysterious viewpoint of an alien, as in
Under the Skin. It is an outlook, however, that might be more prevalent at the insti-
tutional level. The documentary The Corporation (Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott,
2003) makes the case that were the modern corporation a legal person, an actual
person, the kind of person it would typically be is one that is utterly self-interested,
deceitful, callous, without guilt, willing to break social rules for its own ends – in
short, a psychopath. The amoral corporation is itself a familiar character in films,
from Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) to Robocop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987). But typically
in these films, the corporation is pitted against human characters that we can iden-
tify with. Those characters who act in its name have sold their souls and ceased to
be human. In the case of Alien this is quite literally so, since the ‘company man’, the
villainous Ash (Ian Holm), turns out to be an android.
At the same time, there is perhaps something a little convenient about this
relegation of evil to the alien psychopath or the inhuman corporation. The very
notion of ‘evil’, as immoral behaviour that seems so bad that it can only come
from some conscienceless other, may be a convenient way of distancing our-
selves from actions that after all are in the last analysis committed by human
beings like us (see Morton 2004, 4–5, 93–94). It is far more disturbing to think
that terrible things might be done by people we can relate to, people who are
not monsters or sadists but to all intents and purposes ordinary individuals. The
controversy over twentieth-century philosopher Hannah Arendt’s notion of the
‘banality of evil’ was precisely of this nature. Arendt introduced the notion in
her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, based on her coverage of ex-Nazi Eichmann’s
1961 trial in Jerusalem. The controversy was over the idea that a participant in the
Holocaust, a mid-level administrator responsible for organising transportation of
Jews to Nazi death camps, might not be crazy, or a monster, but a normal person,
indeed a nobody, a mediocrity. Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt (2012)
depicts Arendt (played by Barbara Sukowa) covering the Eichmann trial and the
subsequent furore over her book. In it, she is presented defending her position
in a climactic public lecture: ‘I wrote no defense of Eichmann, but I did try to
reconcile the shocking mediocrity of the man with his staggering deeds. Trying to
understand him is not the same thing as forgiveness’.
It might be imagined that one’s conscience would stop them from participating
in such horrors. It is easy to think that there is some kind of moral instinct in us
that would have compelled us to do the right thing, had we been German citizens
during the Nazi period. Arendt herself reports that Eichmann had the opportunity
to see the death camps in operation and was repelled by them, but soon after
began his duties administering transportation. He had a conscience, she suggests,
but it ‘functioned in the expected way for about four weeks, whereupon it began
to function the other way around’ (Arendt 2006, 95). For Arendt, this turnaround
is the real root of Eichmann’s evil. It amounts to him ceasing to think for himself
or to see the world beyond the dictates of Nazi policy. In so doing, he ceased to
see things from the standpoint of other people and to adopt a moral understand-
ing of what he had done to them. Giving himself to the movement, his guiding
principles became efficiency and obedience in the name of the great cause. One’s
conscience can no doubt always be recalibrated in this way, so that one overcomes
one’s ordinary repugnance to crime in order to perform what one understands to
be an important task requiring great courage.
Moreover, even those whose consciences function in the ‘expected way’ may
be less constrained by it than they imagine. This is what the eye doctor Judah
discovers in Crimes and Misdemeanors. Recounting his supposed movie plot to
Cliff at the end of the film, he indicates that while he suffered terrible guilt at first
over what he had done, to the point where he was on the verge of confessing to
the police, that guilt gradually diminished over time; and though he occasionally
has a bad moment, he has learned to live with what he has done. After all, as he
points out, people learn to live with all sorts of terrible sins. And apart from all
this, even if conscience does work as expected to prod us and keep us more or
less on the straight and narrow, we might still want to know why we should obey
our consciences, what reasons we might have for doing so. We need to look more
closely at the issue.
Plato’s Moral Theory
This brings us back to Plato, who presents the original invisibility story, the story
of Gyges. The rest of the Republic is, in effect, Plato’s answer to the question
the story poses, of why we should be moral even if we can get away with being
immoral. In this, Plato wants to reject the view of morality and of human nature
that the story implies: that the only reason to abide by moral standards is to avoid
being caught and punished for transgressing them. Along with that, he rejects the
idea that we are essentially creatures driven by our desires, with morality being
merely an external constraint that limits their satisfaction. Plato acknowledges
that human beings have desires, but he does not think we are just creatures of
desire. He thinks that there are in fact different parts to our makeup. He points out
that we often experience mental conflicts and argues that these conflicts reflect
this internal complexity. Someone who is thirsty but knows the water is poisoned
both wants to drink the water and stops themselves from drinking, which sug-
gests to Plato that one part of the person just wants to drink, but another, differ-
ent part is more wisely and sensibly commanding them not to drink (see Plato
1993, 435c–441c). Move forward now to David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999),
and we see such internal compartmentalisation in dramatically exaggerated form.
The film’s unnamed narrator (Edward Norton), with a responsible job and a well-
furnished apartment, finds that a side of his personality at odds with his ordinary,
responsible self, has taken on a life of its own. He finds himself confronted by his
alter-ego, the anarchic and dangerous Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), for whom jobs
and apartments are merely shackles to be thrown off at the earliest opportunity. If
Durden ultimately turns out to be a delusion on the narrator’s part, this only under-
scores that the split is really internal, between different parts of his personality.
The move from experiencing internal conflicts to imagining that there are liter-
ally different parts operating within ourselves is clearly not a large one. On the
basis of such conflicts, Plato argues that the self, or soul (a term that is without
religious overtones for Plato) has three distinct parts: a rational part, a desiring
element and a spirited part. Reason is the part of the soul that knows reality, calcu-
lates and makes decisions. Its proper role is to rule the desiring part. Desire is the
irrational, appetitive part of the soul, made up of instinctive cravings and urges. It
includes all the physical desires, such as hunger, thirst and sexual desire, as well as
the desire for money. Properly speaking, it should be regulated by reason. To this,
Plato adds a spirited part, which is manifested in feelings of self-disgust, shame,
courage, indignation and strength of will. The spirited part’s role is to provide
reason with the force it needs to govern desire. This picture provides the basis
for Plato’s view of morality. Being moral for Plato is not just a matter of submit-
ting to external constraints that stop you pursuing what is in your self-interest.
It certainly involves controlling and regulating your immediate desires, but by
themselves, these desires cannot be trusted to pursue what is in your interests.
You may want to do all sorts of things that you know, rationally, are bad for you,
like drinking the water you know to be poisonous. The rational part looks at the
overall picture, at what is good for the self as a whole and for each part. So, if I am
really self-interested, I must be ruled by the rational part; I must have a properly
balanced soul, and, for Plato, having this inner balance is what it is to be moral.
What this means is that for Plato, being moral, instead of being opposed to self-
interest, is in fact very much in the interests of the self. It means having a well-
ordered soul, in which each part plays its proper role in the whole. The proper
role of the rational part is to govern the other parts of the soul; the spirited part’s
role is to provide reason with the force it needs to govern; and the appetitive part
should be controlled and regulated by reason. Moral goodness thus amounts to a
kind of mental health or well-being, which is clearly beneficial for its possessor.
It is also an enjoyable state to be in, and so Plato can argue that the moral life is a
happy one. With this picture of the moral human being, Plato introduces an influ-
ential conception of human nature, the idea of human existence as essentially a
struggle between reason and desire, a struggle that reason ought to win. For Plato
and many who come after him, reason is the ‘higher’ part of the human being and
desires are the primitive, irrational and chaotic ‘lower’ part. In these accounts, we
are typically identified most closely with our higher, rational part. While desires
are still seen as part of us, they are often seen as less central, to an extent alien to
us, an unfortunate accompaniment that is perhaps part of our animal heritage, and
certainly needing to be kept in check by the rational self. If the desiring side of our
makeup were allowed to have its way, our inner balance would be overthrown.
We would be enslaved to our appetites and passions, which without any constraint
would become tyrannical.
We can see more clearly how having such an inner balance amounts to being
a morally good person insofar as Plato relates this harmony to our having recog-
nisable virtues, morally admirable character traits. In the well-ordered state, we
would have the virtues of justice, courage, temperance and wisdom, which are
the central elements of Platonic morality. We would be wise because the ruling
element possesses knowledge of what is good for each part and for the whole;
temperate, or self-controlled, because desire and pleasure are tempered by the rule
of reason; and brave because the spirited part allows us to pursue the precepts of
reason and to overcome the distractions of pain and pleasure. Finally, we would
have the overall virtue of being just, where justice is understood not in the modern
sense of having equality of opportunity or outcome, but in terms of something’s
being well-balanced, each part playing its proper role in the whole. So understood,
being just for Plato is synonymous with being moral. Being moral in this way,
with the proper balance of reason, desire and courage, is also a prerequisite for
playing one’s proper role in society (443d-e). And having the proper balance of
parts, with each part playing its proper role, also characterises the just or good
society, the republic that gives Plato’s dialogue its title. The tripartite self becomes
a microcosm of the tripartite society, whose corresponding parts are the ruling
class, the workers and the soldiers. The just society is the one in which each social
group plays its proper role: that of the workers being to serve the rulers, the rulers
to control the workers and the soldiers to do the bidding of the rulers and enforce
their rule. Once again, justice has nothing to do with equality. It amounts to a
morality that consists in playing your proper part in the whole.
Returning to the individual case, the relation between inner balance and moral-
ity is also illuminated when we consider the alternative, when we fail to have this
inner balance. Corresponding to the virtues are various vices, such as foolishness,
cowardice and self-indulgence, all of which are reflections of disharmony in the
soul, of injustice. As is often the case with this reason-centred sort of picture,
immorality is seen to arise above all if one’s desires and appetites escape the con-
trol of reason. If your desires are not under the control of your reason, if you lack
self-control, you won’t be able to pursue your true interests. You won’t be able to
do what is good for you overall, but instead will be subject to the psychological
tyranny of your desires, which will grow out of all proportion. You will be the
victim of your appetites, desiring ever more in the way of food, drink, material
goods, wealth and so on, falling prey to all manner of addictions and obsessions.
Others will suffer as well, since you will be driven to satisfy yourself at their
expense, for example, by seeking the unlimited sexual pleasure that can only be
had through force or deception. Given that morality amounts to a kind of mental
health or well-being, the immoral person is unbalanced, mentally disordered, and
the thoroughly immoral person is on the verge of being insane.
This is an influential conception of evil, or at least, morally bad behaviour.
Being self-indulgent, ruled by one’s appetites and blind to the needs of oth-
ers, is certainly a conventional way of thinking about what being a bad person
involves. The bad children in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Mel
Stuart, 1971) are bad in precisely this way: Augustus and Veruca are greedy and
demanding, Violet and Mike are addicted to the point of obsession with chew-
ing gum and television. They have not improved in the Tim Burton remake,
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005). Mike is now obsessed with video
games. Of course, they are only children, not yet being fully developed adults,
and so have the excuse of not yet being mature. A crucial part of this develop-
ment is learning to govern one’s desires, in the way that Charlie (Peter Ostrum,
and in the remake, Freddie Highmore), the one ‘good’ and also most grown-up
child does. At the same time, in their subjection to their appetites, these little
monsters have something in common with the classic movie monsters of early
cinema, the monsters that seem to personify unleashed desire beyond the con-
trol of reason. A defining mark of the monster is that it is utterly self-seeking,
wholly concerned with satisfying its appetites. There is the wicked Mr Hyde
of Jekyll and Hyde fame, the werewolf, the classic vampire, all grotesque fig-
ures that have been literally deformed by the appetites that consume them. The
cinematic vampire in particular provides an enduring image of a creature com-
pletely given over to its desires, although as we will see, there have also been
some interesting variations on the theme, including the vampire who strives to
manage and control their blood lust and to be good.
These movie monsters are inhuman, and generally speaking have to be hunted
down and destroyed. As always, it is convenient to ascribe wicked acts to some-
thing that is ‘other’, not like us. Yet they are not entirely alien to us. They all
relate in some way to the human psyche, or at least a certain understanding of it.
In particular, the monster can be taken to represent the dangerous desires within
us that strive to escape our control and which we must struggle to keep in check
if we are not to find ourselves being taken over by them. Even the vampire, per-
haps the most alien of these figures, provides a metaphor for human addiction, for
being entirely given over to one’s appetites. In the case of the more complex and
reflective vampire who struggles to control their urges, there is an image of the
human struggle to master desire. These monsters may also be explicitly linked to
the human to the extent that they emerge out of us or take us over. Struggling to
prevent their emergence, or being taken over by them, once again dramatises the
Platonic picture of the individual as engaged in a battle to control their desires and
appetites, and of the consequences of losing control. The monster, all appetite,
unleashed on the world to commit every kind of mayhem in pursuit of its needs,
exemplifies the idea of immoral behaviour as being a matter of unchecked desire.
The Jekyll and Hyde story, popular in the thirties and early forties, but also pre-
sent in one form or another in a number of more recent films, points very clearly
to such a view of the self and of what constitutes immoral behaviour. The two
best known classic versions are those of Rouben Mamoulian (1932) and Victor
Fleming (1941). Both films open with Dr Jekyll (Fredric March and Spencer
Tracy respectively) holding forth on the ‘dual nature of man’, as composed in
Platonic fashion of good and evil parts chained together in the soul, constantly
battling one another. In the films, we see the dire consequences when Dr Jekyll
invents a potion to separate the two halves of his nature. The intention is to free
humans from their ‘evil side’ so that the good in people will be able to develop
unhindered. Instead, it is the evil side that is freed and Jekyll turns into the gro-
tesque, murderous Mr Hyde. In Mamoulian’s film (see Figure 1.2), the evil side is
explicitly characterised in terms of ‘elementary instincts inherited from an animal
past’. In both films, it is identified with desire and appetites, particularly those of
a sexual nature. It manifests itself in Dr Jekyll in the desires he struggles to repress
when, though engaged to be married to a ‘good woman’ (Rose Hobart and Lana
Turner respectively), he meets a ‘bad’ one, Ivy Pierson (Miriam Hopkins and
Ingrid Bergman).
Fleming’s 1941 version of the story is itself more ‘repressed’ than the ear-
lier 1932 film, more toned down in its sexual content. This no doubt reflects
the arrival in Hollywood of the Hays Code, the set of industry moral guidelines
designed to rehabilitate the industry’s image, which was enforced after 1934. Ivy
Pierson, a prostitute in Mamoulian’s version, becomes a barmaid in Fleming’s
remake, with the implication of prostitution being omitted. Ivy’s flirtation with
Jekyll is more overtly sexual in the earlier film than in the later one. Nonetheless,
the 1941 film still manages to smuggle in some surprisingly frank sexual imagery,
particularly in the Tracy Jekyll’s first transformation scene. One of the images
Fleming employs here is that of a horseman and his steeds, an image also used
by Plato. Jekyll experiences himself as a charioteer whipping two horses, which
dissolve into his fiancé e and the barmaid Ivy. But this is not a representation of
reason striving to control the other parts of the soul, as it is in Plato. The image
has in fact been subverted in the film to become a metaphor for the unleashing
of Jekyll’s desires for sexual possession and domination. For both films, desire,
Figure 1.2 The ‘dual nature of man’ in Mamoulian’s version of Dr Jekyll and

Mr Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian, 1931. Credit: Paramount Pictures/
Photofest).
completely unleashed as it is in the figure of Mr Hyde, is hideous, bestial, the

source of all kinds of wickedness. This follows the lines of the Platonic picture,
for which evil arises when desire escapes from the control of reason.
While these are films from an earlier era, the Jekyll and Hyde scenario has
proved to be remarkably resonant and adaptable. It can be seen for example in
Blue Velvet, where the decent, clean-cut hero Jeffrey, like Dr Jekyll, struggles to
control his lower appetites. Despite being involved with the equally good, clean-
cut Sandy (Laura Dern), he similarly finds himself drawn to the ‘bad’ woman, in
this case, nightclub singer Dorothy and the prospect of illicit sex. What he is in
danger of becoming, his Mr Hyde, is represented by the sadistic gangster Frank
who is terrorising Dorothy and sexually exploiting her. Like Mr Hyde, the evil
Frank personifies desire unleashed. He is consumed with uncontrollable desire
and aggression. Confronting this monster is enough to make Jeffrey draw back
from the brink and return to the ‘good’ side. The Jekyll and Hyde theme is also
evident in Fight Club, where the straitlaced narrator finds himself confronted by
his alter-ego Tyler Durden. Durden rejects conventional norms of moral b ehaviour
and embodies all the narrator’s liberated desires and appetites. It’s a case of
‘Dr Jackass and Mr Hyde’, as the narrator’s girlfriend Marla (Helena Bonham
Carter) puts it. In this version, she is playing both the good woman and the bad
one. As in the original Jekyll and Hyde story, the alter-ego is revealed at the end
to have been an aspect of the narrator; although in this case, it also turns out to be
a surprise to the narrator himself, as well as to the audience.
In all of these stories there is a frank acknowledgement by the characters of
the attractiveness of their life of liberated desires, at least initially: the intoxicat-
ing pleasure Jekyll feels in becoming Hyde, the thrill of illicit sexual activity
that Jeffrey experiences in Blue Velvet and the exhilarating liberation the narrator
experiences in adopting Durden’s anarchic lifestyle in Fight Club. However, this
initial attractiveness quickly turns into the miseries of addiction. In each case,
the hero becomes increasingly subordinated to their unleashed desires, which
become ever more demanding and tyrannical. Jekyll becomes increasingly sub-
ject to the ever more uncontrollable Hyde. In Blue Velvet, Jeffrey not only has
to wrestle with the dark desires within himself, but also has to deal with the ter-
rifying Frank, the image of what Jeffrey is in danger of becoming if he stays on
this path, someone entirely given over to their desires and impulses. The troubled
Frank seems the very embodiment of addiction as he sucks on the bottles of mys-
terious gas that he carries with him. In Fight Club, the narrator’s alter-ego Durden
becomes increasingly oppressive towards those around him, and eventually sets
about terrorising the narrator himself. In the slavery to desire, and lack of inner
peace, that these films dramatise, Plato’s idea of immoral behaviour as psycho-
logically costly for the individual is clearly illustrated.
Plato puts a good deal of weight on the psychological costs of immorality,
understood in terms of having an unbalanced personality, in making his case for
it being very much in our interest to be moral. Outside of the extreme scenarios
of internal imbalance dramatised in the monster movie and its variants, where
the costs are clearly apparent, we might also expect them to be evident in the
post-seventies ‘cinema of excess’, with its lurid portrayals of materialist excess,
greed and conspicuous consumption. Many of these films feature gangsters or
businessmen who through their power or financial clout are able to act with com-
plete impunity and satisfy all desires without consequences or repercussions from
the authorities. A number of these films of excess have been mentioned already.
They include Brian de Palma’s remake of Scarface, as well as Martin Scorsese’s
Goodfellas and Wolf of Wall Street.
In de Palma’s gleefully over-the-top Scarface, Tony Montana (Al Pacino) is
an escapee from communist Cuba who decides on a life of crime, becoming a
successful drug dealer and making it big in eighties Miami. Part gangster and part
businessman, he is able through his criminal activities to indulge all his appe-
tites, which, like the film itself, become ever more extravagant and excessive:
endless cars, a garishly luxurious mansion, a spectacular bathtub and mountains
of cocaine. He is unhindered by moral considerations and does very well out
of it. Yet there are undoubtedly costs to all this. He does not ‘get away with it’.
Scarface remains a cautionary tale, if a little operatic in the telling. Eventually,
Montana’s criminal lifestyle catches up with him and he is killed in a shoot-out
after the Colombian drug cartel he has fallen out with invades his mansion. Along
the way, through his obsession with money and possessions, he alienates his fam-
ily and friends, ending up isolated and alone. More importantly, in a reassuring
confirmation of Plato’s predictions, there is internal disquiet as well. When his
friend Manny tells him he should be happy with what he has, he says he ‘wants
what’s coming to me … the world and everything in it’. He simply cannot be
content with what he has; he constantly wants more, but the more he has, the more
paranoid and distrustful he becomes, the more anxious that what he has is going to
be taken from him. And no matter how much his desires are satisfied, he cannot
find satisfaction or fulfilment. In the restaurant scene towards the end of the film,
Tony, in a rare reflective moment, wonders glumly whether there is any point to
his life of endless eating and drinking, sex and drugs.
In Platonic terms, the root cause of Tony Montana’s unhappiness is spirit-
ual imbalance, his unchecked desires ruling over the other parts of his soul. It
is useful to compare him with the Henry Hill character (played by Ray Liotta)
in Goodfellas. This is Martin Scorsese’s quasi-documentary-style film of mafia
informant Hill, based on the latter’s memoir. In the film, Hill, who as far back as
he can remember ‘always wanted to be a gangster’, rises in the ranks of the mob
to enjoy all that the gangster lifestyle has to offer. Along with his new girlfriend
Karen (Lorraine Bracco), we experience the exhilaration and seductiveness of
this life. In the bravura shot of the couple making their way into the Copacabana
nightclub, the money, power and privilege that he enjoys is on full display. Like
Montana, Hill ends up with the cars, the lavish house and endless drugs. However,
the tale is less cautionary than Scarface in the sense that Hill manages to get
away with it at the end of the film. At least, he avoids being killed by his criminal
compatriots, by informing on them and going into a witness protection program.
And moreover, he is not fundamentally unhappy during his life as a gangster.
On the contrary, he fully embraces its privileges and pleasures. What makes him
most unhappy is his new situation, which means that he can no longer enjoy the
unlimited pleasures of the gangster life where ‘everything I wanted was a phone
call away’, and now has to ‘wait in line like everyone else’.
In a similar vein, and also based on the memoirs of a real-life figure, Scorsese’s
later film Wolf of Wall Street presents the story of nineties businessman Jordan
Belfort (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), who founds his own stockbroking firm
and makes a fortune defrauding investors out of millions. Out of this, Belfort and
his employees are able to enjoy a lifestyle of staggering excess, with seemingly
boundless money, sex and drugs to keep them going. At the same time, as with
Goodfellas, there seems to be little psychological cost to all this excess for the
protagonist. In the end, the FBI catches up with him and closes down his opera-
tion, but he agrees to inform on colleagues to buy a lighter sentence; and after his
release, we see him running seminars on sales techniques to transfixed audiences.
Certainly, in pursuing his hedonistic lifestyle he destroys his relationship with
his wife and family. However, he does not seem to experience any inner conflict
or dissatisfaction. Indeed, much of the film’s comedy comes from the way he
so wholeheartedly embraces his lifestyle of consumption. At worst, the relent-
less pleasure-seeking is shown to be physically draining, as the film attests with
its close-ups of bloodshot eyes and drooling faces. The lack of any fundamental
dissatisfaction or unhappiness in the protagonists of these two Scorsese films as
compared with a film like Scarface perhaps mark them out as representative of a
new kind of ‘cinema of excess’ (see Black, 2014).
The two Scorsese films themselves do not make any explicit judgement on
the actions of their main characters, being content simply to show what they do,
although this is by no means equivalent to an endorsement. Nonetheless, what
also seems evident is that the protagonists in both Goodfellas and Wolf of Wall
Street have no obvious reason to be moral. Indeed, they actively despise those
who follow the rules, live ordinary lives, work in traditional jobs and so on; and
by refusing to be bound by conventional rules or moral constraints, following
only their self-interest, they do very well, for a time at least. Nor, although the
law does catch up with them both eventually, do they suffer any particularly ter-
rible punishment in the course of the film. And what in particular seems to be
conspicuously absent in both cases is any psychological cost for their behaviour,
any internal conflict or enslavement to appetites, in apparent conflict with Plato’s
claim that the immoral person is inevitably unhappy. Is this a limitation in the
portrayal of these characters, a failure of dramatic imagination; or is it in fact a
more ‘realistic’ view of human beings than Plato’s?
Certainly from a modern perspective, the idea of a life devoted to the satisfac-
tion of one’s appetites and the pursuit of individual self-interest seems more plau-
sible than it would have been for Plato. Plato’s thinking as we have seen is steeped
in a morality where the ruling idea is that parts play their proper role in the larger
whole, the individual in society as well as the parts within the individual. As such,
a life dominated by desire and self-interest is likely to appear as akin to madness
(see Malik 2014, 31). However, one of the features of modern thinking, since
the seventeenth-century philosopher Hobbes at least, has been a down-to-earth
view of the human being as primarily a creature of desire, driven fundamentally
by egoistic self-interest. From this point of view, the unapologetically self-inter-
ested gangster or businessman is really just the natural human being, the human
being stripped of all pretence or external trappings, who no longer subscribes to
what Hobbes calls the social contract. This is the mutual agreement we make to
constrain our individual appetites in order to be able to enjoy the benefits of an
organised social life.
We will return to the discussion of the early modern individual and its impli-
cations for ethical thinking in Chapter Three. For the moment, it can simply be
noted that while the Hobbesian notion of the human being as primarily a creature
of desire might seem more down to earth, or realistic, it is also quite crude and
reductive. The Platonic picture at least acknowledges a richer picture of human
existence, one in which it is possible to experience internal conflict, and one can
become enslaved to one’s own appetites. These phenomena have themselves been
interpreted by Plato in terms of a philosophical notion of what human beings
most essentially are, creatures with internally balanced souls. This is a normative
conception of human nature in which the good life is understood as the most fully
developed human life, where human beings are most fully realised. What then of
characters like Goodfellas’ Henry Hill and Wolf of Wall Street’s Jordan Belfort?
One could argue that they do not constitute a counter-example to Plato’s account.
Regardless of how they feel, no matter how satisfied they declare themselves
with their lives, they might nonetheless still be ‘objectively’ unhappy, living a
less than fully human life. However, this also means that we can no longer sup-
port this philosophical conception of human nature by reference to the feelings of
individuals themselves.
What remains clear is that for Plato, morality is not an arbitrary ideal. It is bound
up with a certain conception of the self, of our nature. Being moral is a matter of
living in accordance with our nature. The virtuous human being is the one that is
most fulfilled as a human being. At the same time, it can be argued that Plato’s
ethics is not in the last analysis a morality of self-fulfilment or self-realisation.
For Plato, being moral is a reflection of a larger, ‘transcendental’ order. This is
the world of the ‘Forms’, the timeless, unchanging essences of things that exist
in a non-natural realm, beyond the ordinary, shifting world that we experience in
everyday life. These include the Forms of the moral virtues, Wisdom, Courage,
Temperance and the overarching Form of justice. And these Forms are them-
selves variations of the ultimate Form of the Good. Individual harmony, the bal-
anced state of the just individual, mirrors the larger harmonious order of the world
of Forms. The ultimate basis of morality for Plato, then, is not to be found in
human nature but in his conception of ultimate reality, the transcendental world
of the Forms.
As such, Plato’s moral position can be characterised as an ‘objectivist
non-naturalism’, in which there are objective but otherworldly moral standards or
laws. For Plato, there is one universal, objective form of the good life, which the
rational part of our soul can discover by coming to know the forms. Reason in his
account has two functions, to control the lower parts of the soul and to know the
truth about reality, the transcendental forms that ultimately ground moral judge-
ments. Accordingly, discovering the good life is a rational task, like determining
the principles of mathematics. Through this knowledge, the rational part knows
how to do what is good for the person overall. At times, Plato goes so far as to
suggest that you can only be truly virtuous if you have knowledge of the forms
(Plato 1993, 517c), though elsewhere he concedes that one could still acquire
justice and live the good life by imitating those with knowledge of the good.
However, he does acknowledge that knowledge alone is not sufficient for virtuous
behaviour. To be virtuous we must not only understand what is good overall for
us, but also have mastery over ourselves, so the appetites agree with the guidance
provided by the rational part of the soul. We need, that is, to develop virtuous
habits, in the sense of making the appetites docile and compliant so that they will
obey reason’s commands.
Despite these qualifications, some have still found Plato’s account too ration-
alistic, too focused on making ethics a matter of reason and knowledge. Can we
know what the right thing to do is, in the way that we can have mathematical
or scientific knowledge? Is establishing the right thing to do, or the proper life
to lead, anything like gaining knowledge of the world? And is there really only
one correct answer to what it is to lead the good life, as Plato seems to imply?
Couldn’t there be a number of ways in which one can be good? Plato’s emphasis
on reason might be thought overly rationalistic in another way. His view that
reason needs to be firmly in charge means that his notion of inner mental har-
mony is a repressive, authoritarian one, marked by suspicion and hostility towards
desire. For Plato, being moral, living the good life, requires us to firmly control
our desires. However, this kind of moral authoritarianism might be thought less a
recipe for inner harmony and mental health than itself a source of unbalance and
illness. And underlying this is a narrow identification of human beings with their
rationality, the desires being marginalised as the primitive, irrational lower part of
our makeup. In another dialogue, Plato presents the rational soul as imprisoned by
the body, which corrupts it with bodily needs and desires, and stands in the way
of its knowing the truth about reality. The philosopher longs for the purification
of the soul from the body, which comes only with death. Only as pure mind can
we behold the transcendent Forms, things in their purest form. For the soul that
is still imprisoned in the body, reason needs to keep desire firmly under control
(Plato 2003, 77a–84b). We may wonder however whether this is a particularly
healthy conception of human nature, given that it sets us in such stark opposition
with ourselves.
From the modern perspective at least, even if we don’t want to go so far as to
say with Hobbes that human beings are no more than creatures of desire, we are
still more inclined to see desires as an important and legitimate part of our makeup.
As such, we are more likely to see dangers in excessive repression or self-denial.
This is evident in the cinematic representations of the Jekyll and Hyde story. Even
if the Mamoulian and Fleming versions demonise desire as belonging to our evil
side, an obstacle to being good, and portray the dangers of it getting out of control
in the figure of Mr Hyde, the films also betray a modern sensibility in presenting
Dr Jekyll as a vigorous, passionate man who is frustrated by the oppressive stric-
tures of Victorian society. It is suggested in both cases that Jekyll is being driven
to despair by being forced to endure a long engagement to his fiancé . The reimag-
ining of the story in Blue Velvet portrays the indispensability of desire even more
forcefully. Its hero Jeffrey manages to put his own perverse desires behind him to
overcome his evil side and to kill his alter-ego Frank Booth. On one level it is a
happy ending, with good triumphing resoundingly over evil. But as noted earlier,
the good, decent world that Jeffrey leaves and eventually returns to, represented
in the picture-perfect images of the town at the beginning and end of the film,
is, it is being suggested, an unreal idealisation. Just beneath the surface, the film
suggests, there remain primal desires and instincts that we cannot disown, that are
part of who we are and which we have to learn to deal with.
This is not, however, to advocate the complete liberation of desires from con-
trol. The Mr Hyde and Frank Booth characters also embody the idea that desire
unconstrained is chaotic, threatening and at odds with sociability. Arguably one
cannot be a properly developed human being, able to function in a rule-governed
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In the more severe cases with already existing impaction of the
colon, purgatives and copious injections will be demanded as advised
under that disease.
In dogs the first object is the unloading of the rectum and colon
and this usually demands direct mechanical intervention. (See
Intestinal Indigestion with Constipation.) In case of hypertrophied
prostate this may be rendered somewhat difficult, yet with a free use
of oily, soapy or mucilaginous injections it can usually be
accomplished.
The further treatment is on the same line as for the soliped. An
abundance of exercise in the open air is a prime essential, together
with a free access to fresh water. House dogs must be taken out for
urination and defecation at regular times that are not too far apart.
The food must be of a laxative nature. At first fresh whey or
buttermilk only may be allowed, but as some action of the bowels is
obtained well salted beef tea, pulped or scraped red muscle seasoned
with salt, or milk treated in the same way is permissible. If the
bowels fail to respond when the dog is taken out at the regular times
an injection of cold water may be given. Sulphate of eserine (⅕ gr.)
may be given daily by the mouth or hypodermically, or castor oil (½
to 1 oz.) may be administered at one dose to be followed by careful
dietary and hygienic measures. Or sweet oil, calomel and jalap,
podophyllin, or colocynth may be substituted. When the bowels have
been freely opened a daily morning dose of a drop of the fluid extract
of belladonna and ½ gr. of nux vomica will often materially improve
the peristalsis. Active manipulation of the abdomen may be
employed, or, if available, a current of electricity through the torpid
bowels for 10 or 15 minutes daily.
CONSTIPATION IN BIRDS.
Causes: Matted feathers, impacted cloaca, arrest of eggs, debility, catarrh,
parasites, nervous disorder. Symptoms: swelling of anus, pendent abdomen,
waddling gait, straining without effect. Treatment: remove obstruction by
mechanical means, cut off matted feathers, egg matter may demand laparotomy,
castor oil, tincture of rhubarb, enemata, green food, ensilage, roots, onions.
In birds torpid and obstructed bowels may come from the effects
of a previous diarrhœa, which has led to the matting together of the
feathers over the anus at once obstructing defecation and rendering
it painful. It may result in and be aggravated by a slow accumulation
of indigestible matters in the intestine or cloaca (pebbles, feathers,
etc.), and the arrest of eggs in the oviduct, pressing upon and
obstructing the bowel. In a recent case the author removed 18 ozs. of
impacted egg matter from the oviduct of a hen, which when divested
of this load weighed barely 2 lbs. Debility of the general system and
particularly of the walls of the bowels, and its various causes (old
age, exhausting disease, intestinal catarrh, parasites, nervous
diseases, etc.) retard defecation and favor impaction as in the
mammal.
The symptoms may be; hard dry droppings, matting of the
feathers over the anus with feculent matters, a firm swelling
surrounding the sphincter, a pendent condition of the abdomen
which when manipulated is felt to be firm and resistant, ruffling of
the feathers, drooping of the head, wings and tail, walking sluggishly
with legs half bent and a waddling gait, and ineffectual attempts to
defecate.
Treatment. As in dogs remove the obstructing mass by mechanical
means. Matted feathers may be clipped off, and feculent
accumulations may be dislodged by the aid of the finger, or in small
birds of a blunt prob. This may be favored by manipulation through
the abdominal walls, and the injection of soapy or oily enemata.
Accumulations of impacted egg matter may be similarly removed, or,
failing this, by an incision made through the abdominal walls and
oviduct. As a purgative give one or two teaspoonfuls castor oil
according to the size of the hen, or a few drops to a small cage bird.
For the latter Friedberger and Fröhner advise a few drops of tincture
of rhubarb in the drinking water. Injections of warm or cold
soapsuds or water may be continued as symptoms demand. Green
food, ensilage, roots, worms, snails and insects are indicated to
correct the tendency to costiveness and may be continued until the
bowels have acquired their proper tone. A moderate allowance of
onions is often of great value.
HAIR BALLS IN THE INTESTINES—HORSE.
EGAGROPILES.
Seat, colon, cæcum; hair of oat seed, clover leaf, vine tendrils, hair of horse,
nucleus, calcic admixture, straw, in horses on dry food, with depraved appetite, or
with skin disease. Symptoms: none, or torpid bowels, colics, recurring,
fermentations, tympany, obstruction, rupture, peritonitis, rectal exploration.
Lesions: impacted ball, with excess of liquid and gas in front, rupture, ragged
bloody edges. Treatment: extraction, enemata, eserine, barium chloride.
Hair balls, received the name of egagropiles because of their
discovery in the alimentary canal of the wild goat, but they are found
in various forms in all the domestic animals. In horses they occupy
the cæcum and colon and are most frequently composed of the fine
vegetable hairs that surround the grain of the oat, or the leaf of
clover, of the woody tendrils of vines, and of the hairs of themselves
and their fellows taken in at the period of moulting. They sometimes
contain a nucleus of leather or other foreign body which has been
swallowed but in many cases no such object can be found, the hair
having become rolled and felted by the vermicular movements of the
stomach and intestines. An admixture of mucus assists materially in
the felting, and calcareous and magnesian salts may make up the
greater part of the mass, rendering it virtually a calculus. They may
further have a large admixture of straw and vegetable fibres of larger
size than oat or clover hairs. They are most frequent in horses kept
on dry food, (sweepings of oatmeal mills) and at hard work, and
which show depraved appetite and lick each other. Omnibus horses
suffer more than army horses. Skin diseases, by encouraging licking,
contribute to their production.
Symptoms. In the great majority of cases hair balls do not
seriously incommode the horse. They do not attain a large size, and
being light do not drag injuriously on the intestine and mesentery.
They do, however, retard the movement of the ingesta, and when
grown to a considerable size they may block the intestine, more
particularly the pelvic flexure, the floating colon or rectum. Under
such conditions they produce colics which may be slight, transient,
and recurrent, or severe and even fatal, having all the characteristics
of complete obstruction from other causes. Fermentations,
tympanies, and straining without defecation are common features.
When the obstruction takes place in the pelvic flexure, the floating
colon or rectum, it may often be detected by rectal exploration. When
complete obstruction occurs all the violent symptoms of that
condition are present, and these may pass into those of rupture
(Peuch, Leblanc, Neyraud), and shock or peritonitis. If the animal
has passed hair balls even months before, the colics may with
considerable confidence be attributed to other balls of the same kind.
Lesions. In case of death there are the usual lesions of gaseous
indigestion, with or without enteritis, but with the accumulation of a
great quantity of liquid contents, above the ball, which is felt as a
firm body impacted in the gut. In other cases the distended bowel
has given way and the liquid contents and often the hair ball as well
are found free in the abdominal cavity. In such a case the edges of the
laceration are covered with blood clots and thickened with
inflammatory exudation, and there is more or less peritonitis.
Treatment. Relief may sometimes be obtained by the extraction of
a hair ball lodged in the rectum or adjacent part of the floating colon.
In other cases abundant soapy or oily enemata, and the employment
of eserine or barium chloride subcutem are indicated.
HAIR AND BRISTLE BALLS IN DOG AND
PIG.
From licking in skin disease. Symptoms: of obstruction. Treatment:
manipulation, enemata, oil, antispasmodics, eserine, barium chloride, laparotomy,
diet in convalescence.
The hair balls of dogs come mainly from licking themselves when
affected with skin diseases or parasites. In pigs they are mostly
attributed to depraved appetite.
The hair balls of the dog are small, open in texture, and easily
disintegrated, having little mucus and no earthy salts in their
composition.
The bristle balls of pigs take the form of straight or curved rods of
firm consistency, but without earthy salts. The projecting ends of the
bristles render them particularly irritating.
The symptoms are those of obstruction of the bowels, and the
treatment consists in efforts to dislodge them. If situated near the
anus they may sometimes be reached with the finger, or copious oily
injections may facilitate their passage. Manipulations through the
abdominal walls may be helpful in the dog. Oleaginous laxatives and
antispasmodics may be tried, or these failing, eserine or barium
chloride. As a last resort laparotomy may be performed, the ball
abstracted and the intestine and abdominal wall carefully sutured
(Siedamgrotzky). In such a case the diet should be restricted for a
week to beef soups, buttermilk, and well boiled gruels, especially
flaxseed.
INTESTINAL CALCULI. ENTEROLITHS.
BEZOARS.
Earthy basis, nucleus, stratification, in cæcum or colon, multiple, size, number

up to 1000. Composition, phosphates of lime, magnesia, and ammonia, silica,
mucus, epithelium, organic matter. Ammonio-magnesian tend to crystalline form,
common phosphate of lime to smooth forms. Concretions. Source in food.
Ammonia from bacteridian fermentation, action of colloids, varied nuclei, rapid
growth. Lesions: catarrh, dilation, obstruction, rupture, peritonitis. Symptoms:
intermittent colics with obstruction, tympany, bowel distension, liquid and
gaseous, before obstruction. Diagnosis: by hand in rectum, hard obstruction with
distension in front. Treatment: purgative dangerous, but exceptionally successful,
extraction, oleaginous enemata, laparotomy.
Horse. Intestinal calculi have an earthy basis (ammonio-

magnesian phosphate, or oxalate of lime, and more or less silica)
glued together by mucus and having a central nucleus usually of
some foreign body, (a particle of sand, pebble, morsel of hair, lead,
cloth, nail, coin, blood clot, or inspissated mucus) around which the
earthy salts have been deposited layer after layer. They are usually
formed in the cæcum or double colon and may be multiple and
moulded upon each other, so that they become discoid, angular or
otherwise altered from the globular shape. The worn, flattened
surface in such cases shows concentric rings representing the layers
as deposited in succession.
The size of the masses may be from a pea or smaller, up to calculi
of six inches in diameter.
In number there may be a single calculus or there may be an
indefinite quantity. Zundel counted 400 in a single colon, and Gurlt
1,000.
Composition. They are usually composed of phosphate of lime and
of magnesia, of ammonio-magnesian phosphate, with a little silica,
mucus, epithelium, and organic matters from the ingesta. Traces of
sodium chloride, and iron oxide may also be present.
The phosphates of lime, magnesia, and of ammonia and magnesia
usually constitute the main part of the calculus. Fürstenberg found
specimens in which the ammonio-magnesian phosphate amounted
to 72 to 94 per cent.
The calculi containing an excess of ammonio-magnesian
phosphate tend to assume a crystalline or coralline form which
causes them to be specially irritating to the mucosa. When broken
they show a radiated structure from the centre to the circumference
in addition to the concentric rings. These are usually of a yellowish
brown or a gray color and have a specific gravity of 1694 to 1706.
Calculi in which the common phosphate of lime abounds are likely
to be smooth on the surface and on section show the concentric rings
more distinctly and the radiating lines less so. The brownish calculi
of this variety are much more compact, and harder than the
crystalline or mulberry calculi, and have a higher specific gravity—
(1823).
Bluish calculi with a smooth glistening surface and lower specific
gravity—1681—, have been found of small size and in great numbers
in the colon (1000 in the colon, Gurlt).
In some calculi there is a large admixture of alimentary matters,
and a low specific gravity (1605 to 1674). These were designated as
pseudo calculi, by Fürstenberg.
In still other cases a calculous looking mass, when broken into, is
found to be composed of a mass of dried alimentary matter enclosed
in a thin layer of lime salts. These have a low specific gravity (1446 to
1566) and have been named concretions by Fürstenberg.
Causes. As a large proportion of the calculus is phosphate of lime
or ammonio-magnesian phosphate, we must look for the source of
these in the food and then at the conditions which determine their
precipitation.
The percentage of ash and of phosphoric acid in the common foods
of horses may be seen in the following table:
Ash. PO5 in the Ash. PO5 in the entire food.
Per cent. Per cent. Per cent.
Wheat bran 7.3 50 3.65
Wheat grain 3.0 46.38 1.3914
Oats grain 2.50 26.5 0.6625
Barley grain 3.10 39.9 1.2276
Bean grain 3.10 31.6 0.9864
Pea grain 2.75 34.8 0.957
Tare grain 3.00 36.2 1.086
Indian corn grain 1.5
Rye grain 1.6 39.9 1.0384
The source of the magnesia may be found to a large extent in the

grains represented in the following table:
Ash. Mg. in Ash.

Per cent. Per cent.
Oat, grain 2.50 7.3
Barley, grain 3.10 8.5
Rye, grain 1.6 2.4
Wheat, grain 2.12 9.98
Wheat, bran 7.3 11.2
Bean 3.1 6.6
Pea 2.7 5.6
The amount of magnesia in each of these grains is amply sufficient

to furnish the material for the constant growth of a calculus. Wheat
bran is preëminent in the amount of its magnesia and therefore
wheat bran has been charged with predisposing to calculi. In the
perisperm as a whole, Fürstenberg found 1 per cent. of phosphate of
magnesia, and in coarse bran not less than 2.5 per cent.
The ammonia which is essential to the precipitation of the
phosphate of magnesia in the form of the compound salt (ammonio-
magnesian) can be found wherever proteids are in process of septic
fermentation. The slightest failure to peptonize every particle of such
proteids, implies septic change and the evolution of ammonia, which
on coming in contact with magnesia phosphate instantly precipitates
the insoluble salt.
This fully agrees with the doctrine of the formation of urinary
calculi through the agency of bacteria, since the ammonia is
essentially a fermentation or bacterial product.
It may also be noted that the experiments of Rainey and Ord
showed that in the presence of colloids (mucus, epithelium, pus,
blood) the earthy salts are precipitated as minute globular bodies
which by further accretions become calculi. In the absence of colloids
the salts tend to precipitate in angular crystalline forms, so that the
mulberry and coralline calculi may possibly have been precipitated in
the absence of such bodies. From the solvent quality of ammonia,
however, the contents may easily pass from a fermenting liquid
containing colloids to a non-fermenting and noncolloid mixture.
The presence of a solid body which may act as a nucleus is an
essential element, and the condition of the food or drink will often
supply this. It has been noticed that army horses in the field, feeding
from the ground and taking in sand and pebbles, are unusually liable
to intestinal calculus. Horses which lick earth in connection with
acidity of the stomach or other dyspepsia are specially subject to it.
Horses watered from shallow streams with sandy bottoms, where
they take in sand with the water, have been similarly affected.
Millers’ horses, in the days of old process milling, suffered not alone
because of the abundance of oat hairs in the feed but also on account
of the grit from the millstones. Hay and other fodders that have lain
on the ground and which contain earth and sand furnish other
sources of such nuclei. Shingle nails and other small nails, pins,
needles, coins, etc., which have mixed with the feed are common
causes of trouble, and indeed any foreign body may become the
centre and starting point of a calculus.
Catarrhal affections and other lesions of the mucosa, which furnish
excess of mucus, beside pus, lymph and even blood as nuclei, are
invoked as starting points of the calculi, but however true this may
be in particular cases, irritation and catarrh appear to be much more
frequently the result than the cause of the calculus.
Attempts have been made to estimate the time taken in the
formation of a calculus by allowing a ring for each feed and
successive deposit therefrom (Fürstenberg, Colin). Thus a calculus of
14 pounds with 720 layers, it was estimated could be formed in one
year at two feeds per day. More definite evidence was found in the
case of Pastore in which a coin with the mint mark of 1847 was found
as the nucleus of a calculus the size of the fist in 1848.
Lesions. Formed in the most spacious parts of the colon and
cæcum, calculi usually rest there for a length of time without visible
injury, and it is only when they are moved onward and get arrested at
a narrow part of the gut (pelvic flexure, floating colon, rectum) that
they cause appreciable trouble. Yet it is claimed that by their weight
they drag upon the yielding walls of the bowel, causing dilatation and
attenuation, weakening the peristalsis and predisposing to rupture.
The compression of the vessels also tends to anæmia and atrophy. In
the case of rough crystalline calculi the mucosa is subjected to
attrition, irritation, and inflammation. The more serious and urgent
trouble is that of obstruction of the narrower portions of the colon
and rectum, which may be absolute and persistent, leading to
rupture and death or a fatal inflammation on the one hand, or may
end in recovery on the other, in connection with a displacement
onward or backward of the calculus as the result of peristalsis or
anti-peristalsis.
Symptoms. These are intermittent colics, each reaching a climax
and followed by a sudden recovery as the calculus is displaced into a
more spacious part of the colon. A significant feature is the complete
obstruction, fæces being passed for a short time at first and then
suddenly and absolutely stopped. Coincident with this are tympany,
violent colics, straining, rolling, sitting on the haunches,
perspirations, anxious countenance, and all the symptoms of
obstruction.
Diagnosis is never quite certain unless the practitioner with his
oiled hand in the rectum can detect a hard stony mass obstructing
the pelvic flexure of the double colon with a tense elastic distended
bowel immediately in front of it, or a similar hard obstruction of the
terminal part of the floating colon with a similar distension in front
of it. The pelvic flexure may usually be felt below and to the right at
the entrance to the pelvis, and the floating colon above, under the
right, or more commonly the left kidney. Calculi in the more spacious
parts of the double colon or in the cæcum are inaccessible to
manipulation. The feed (bran, ground feed) will be suggestive, as will
the occupation of the proprietor (miller, baker).
Treatment. This is rather a hopeless undertaking. No effective
solvent of the calculus can be given, and purgatives usually increase
the danger by increasing the peristalsis and dangerously distending
the bowel above the point of obstruction. It is true that this is
sometimes followed by a temporary recovery the calculus being
loosened and falling back into the dilated portion of the bowel. Less
frequently the increase in the peristalsis forces on a moderately sized
calculus to complete expulsion. It is a desperate though sometimes
successful resort. A more rational course of treatment is the dilation
of the bowel back of the obstruction by copious mucilaginous, soapy
or oleaginous enemata. Trasbot suggests CO2 produced by injecting
sodium bicarbonate and tartaric acid. This may be seconded by the
hypodermic injection of barium chloride or of atropia. When the
calculus is lodged in the floating colon or rectum it may be possible
to reach it with the hand and extract it at once. The last resort, is by
laparotomy for the removal of the calculus. One such successful case
is on record in which Filizet removed a calculus as large as an
infant’s head. In other cases the horses failed to survive. Desperate as
the resort may be it is not to be neglected in a case of undoubted
calculus, solidly impacted and of such a size that its passage is
impossible. A fatal result is imminent, and even if the present attack
should pass off it can only be looked on in the light of an
intermission, so that there is practically nothing to lose in case the
result should prove fatal. Anæsthesia and rigid antiseptic measures
should of course be adopted.
FOREIGN BODIES IN THE INTESTINES OF
SOLIPEDS.
Sand, pebbles, earth, lime, nails, pins, needles, coins, shot, cloth, leather, rubber,
sponge, tooth, bone, wood, twine. Symptoms: as in intestinal indigestion or calculi,
or sand or pebbles in fæces; peritonitis, phlegmon. Lesions: congestion, catarrh,
ulceration, abscess, needles may travel to other organs. Treatment: laxative,
enemata, or as for calculi.
All sorts of foreign bodies are taken in with food and water and
find their way to the intestines. Sand from drinking from shallow
streams with sandy bottoms, from browsing on sandy pastures where
the vegetation is easily torn up, or from feeding grain from sandy
earth will sometimes load the intestines to an extraordinary extent so
that such horses will pass sand for some weeks after leaving the
locality. Small stones and gravel are taken in in the same way or from
the habit of eating earth or licking crumbling lime walls. Nails, pins,
needles, coins, shot, pieces of cloth, leather, caouchouc, sponge, and
even a molar tooth and a piece of a dorsal vertebra have been thus
taken. Recently the author saw a small twig of hard wood transfixing
the pylorus and duodenum with fatal effect. In another case were
balls of binding twine which had been taken in with the fodder on
which it had been used.
The symptoms are usually those of intestinal indigestion or calculi.
In some cases, however, they are peculiar, thus there may be a
constant passage of sand, there may be indications of peritonitis, or
there may form a phlegmonous swelling of the abdominal walls in
the abscess of which the foreign body is found.
Lesions. Pechoux found 56 lbs. of a brownish earth in the cæcum
and colon. Congestion and ulceration of the intestines are common,
with occasionally abscess. All the lesions that attend on or follow
obstruction may be met with. Boullon saw a remarkable case of the
ingestion of needles in which these bodies were found in the small
intestine, liver, pancreas, diaphragm, kidney and lung.
Treatment varies with the character of the bodies ingested, sand
and gravel may be passed on by a laxative diet and even by the use of
mild laxatives. Bernard gave 10 quarts of water and 4 oz. Glauber
salts every hour for eight days, and the same amount by enema. For
the larger solid bodies which obstruct the intestines the treatment is
the same as for calculus. For sharp pointed bodies causing abscess
and fistulæ, we must follow the indications, ever aiming at the
discovery of the whereabouts of the offending object and its removal.
RUMINANTS.
Foreign bodies are usually arrested in the rumen of cattle and
unless sharp, pointed or rough so as to cause mechanical trouble or
caustic so as to act chemically, rarely do much harm. The most
extraordinary objects that have found their way into the intestine are
snakes. Gherardi claims that he found in the intestines a snake of 25
inches long; Jager found one of 21 inches in length, in an advanced
state of decomposition, in the rectum of a calf. It is supposed that
both had been taken in with the food. In each case there was
obstruction of the intestine with severe colicy symptoms.
CARNIVORA.
Small bodies, especially playthings, feathers, hair, bristles, bones of prey.

Lesions: congestion, inflammation, hemorrhage, ulceration, perforation,
invagination. Symptoms: colic, vomiting, tucked up belly, straining, palpitation,
rabiform symptoms, cough, convulsions. Course: emaciation, prostration, death in
five days or two weeks according to seat of obstruction. Treatment: Oleaginous
injections, laparotomy.
Causes. The dog is especially liable to this form of trouble, in

consequence of his habit of carrying objects in his mouth and of
playing with different objects especially the playthings of children.
Marbles, pebbles, spinning-tops, corks, coins, nuts, peach stones,
pieces of rubber, cloth or leather, bits of wood, sponge, needles, pins,
potato, bone, cord, hair, bristles, feathers, wire, and a number of
other objects. Some of them like feathers, hair, and bones are
swallowed with food, and when that has been digested, they are
either vomited or failing in this, are passed on into the intestine.
Lately the author made a post mortem of a house dog with over 24
inches of the jejunum virtually blocked with fragments gnawed from
a caouchouc ball and pieces of twine.
Cats also swallow a variety of objects. Benjamin and Megnin
record three cases of intestinal obstruction by the crystal drops of
shades.
Lesions. When the lumen of the intestine is blocked with a round
solid body like a marble or peach stone there occur active congestion,
inflammation, blood stasis and hemorrhage, with in many cases
necrosis, ulceration and perforation. Similar lesions occur from cord.
In a recent case of impaction with gnawed fragments of caouchouc
and cord, the 24 inches of the bowel implicated were the seat of
extended patches of necrosis and of deep, and even perforating
ulcers on the lesser curvature of the intestine, evidently caused by
the tension of the stretched cord on the shorter attached border of
the gut. Cadeac says the lesions from cord are always at the point of
attachment of the mesentery, whereas those coming from round or
cubical solid bodies are mainly on the greater curvature. Mathis
found at the pylorus a piece of net from which a cord extended
through the small intestine and ended in a ravelled mass near the
ileo-cæcal valve. The dragging of the cord on the intestine often
causes invagination at one or several points.
Symptoms. There may be slight colic, dullness, a disposition to lie
curled up in some secluded place, loss or caprice of appetite,
vomiting, tucked up abdomen, arching of the back, straining, and
unless the bowels are distended with gas, the obstruction can usually
be felt by the two hands applied on opposite sides of the abdomen.
The matters vomited are at first alimentary, then bilious and in the
advanced stages always feculent.
The French veterinarians assure us that rabiform symptoms are
very common as the result of obstruction of the intestines with
foreign bodies. The indications are signs of fury without the barking
which characterizes genuine rabies. The patient becomes wicked,
cross and excitable, sometimes dull and morose, and snappish, his
eyes glittering and his mouth frothy. He has alternate paroxysms of
fury and torpor, at one time flying at and biting any living thing he
meets, or tearing some object to pieces, and at another hiding away
in secluded and dark corners. Massenat saw two dogs supposed to be
affected by rabies, but which recovered promptly after having
vomited the foreign bodies which they had swallowed. In a country
where rabies is so prevalent as in France, it would be interesting to
see the results of inoculation with some of the most pronounced of
these rabiform cases.
Beside the rabiform symptoms cough and epileptic seizures
occasionally result from the foreign bodies.
Course. Termination. Unless relief is obtained by vomiting or
purging, appetite ceases altogether, emaciation advances rapidly, the
animal becomes dull and stupid, being evidently poisoned by the
absorbed toxins, and death may ensue in four or five days if the
obstruction is near the stomach, or in one or two weeks if in the large
intestines.
Treatment. The general treatment advised for the horse is
applicable to the carnivora. Purgatives are always dangerous as
threatening the overdistension and rupture of the bowel above the
obstruction. Oleaginous and mucilaginous injections with
manipulations are more promising if the obstruction is in the colon
or rectum.
In many cases laparotomy is the only hopeful resort. Felizet and
Degive have been quite successful in removing corks in this way, and
Fröhner advises the operation to be performed under opium
narcosis, and with antiseptic precautions. Make an incision of 1¾
inch near the umbilicus and parallel to the linea alba, extract the
blocked loop of intestine, ligature it in front of the foreign body and
behind it, incise, remove the offending mass and carefully close by
sutures, bringing the muscular and serous coats in accurate
opposition. Remove the ligatures, disinfect, return the bowel into the
abdomen, close the abdominal wound with sutures and apply an
antiseptic bandage.
If such cases are to be operated on it is important that it be done
early, before the occurrence of necrosis, ulceration, perforation, or
general infection.
RUPTURE OF THE INTESTINE. SOLIPEDS.
Causes: overdistensions in front of obstructions, softening, friability, necrosis,
suppuration or ulceration, Duodenum from worms or perforation by pointed
bodies, exudate in verminous embolism, petechial fever. Jejunum and ileum, by
disease of walls, ulcers, abscesses, neoplasms, caustics in umbilical hernia,
clamping of hernia. Cæcum, falls, blows, kicks, blows of horn, tusk, stump, calculi,
abscesses, cauterizing of hernia. Colon, external traumas, calculi, worms,
verminous thrombosis, neoplasms, abscesses, overdistensions, violent straining,
arsenic. Symptoms: follow accident, signs of obstruction, no rumbling, tympany,
stiffness, great prostration, fever. Death in short time.
Causes. Ruptures occur as we have already seen from
overdistensions of the bowel in front of some obstruction, by ingesta,
concretions, calculi, foreign bodies, etc., and this may take place in
the most healthy organs. In other cases, however, there has been
some pathological process at work rendering the intestinal wall soft,
friable, necrotic, suppurative or ulcerative, by which its substance is
attenuated or its consistency or cohesion reduced.
Duodenum. Lacerations of the duodenum are often connected
with obstruction by tumors or the ravages of worms. These latter are
mostly the ascaris megalocephala, accumulated in mass, and
sometimes engaged in pouches outside the walls of the gut. In other
cases, the walls of the intestine have been perforated by hard woody
stalks of straw or hay (Mollereau) or of still more woody plants as in
a case observed by the author, and in which the pylorus was
perforated. Sometimes the exudate or blood extravasation attending
on petechial fever, or verminous embolism will pave the way for the
rupture. Perforations by pieces of wire (Schmidt) or other metallic
bodies are also observed. Adhesive peritonitis has also rendered the
walls friable and predisposed to rupture.
Jejunum and Ileum. Lesions are most frequent toward the
termination of the ileum and resulting from obstructions of the
bowel or the weakening of the walls by disease, or both. Ulcerations,
abscess of the closed follicles opening into the peritoneum, and
neoplasms of various kinds are to be especially noted among the
causes. The impaction of the cæcum, blocking the ileo-cæcal valve is
also among the observed factors. Other instances have been traced to
deep cauterization of an umbilical hernia, the enclosed loop of small
intestine becoming inflamed and perforated. The author has
observed one instance from clamping of a hernia in which the
contained intestine was adherent to the hernial sac.
Cæcum. From its position on the lower part of the abdomen and
from its habitual plenitude with food or water, this organ is
especially exposed to direct mechanical injuries and ruptures. A
sudden fall, more especially if the umbilical region strikes on a stone
or other projecting solid body, kicks with heavy boots or with the feet
of other animals, blows with a cow’s horn or a boar’s tusks, and
violent contact with stumps, poles and other objects may be the
occasion of the rupture. These are usually found near the base of the
viscus and across its longitudinal direction.
Inflammations, connected with punctures, calculi, parasites, etc.,
may render the walls so friable that they give way under slight strain
or injury. Abscesses have been found in the walls of the viscus
leading to perforation, and extension of inflammation from an
umbilicus cauterized for hernia has determined adhesion and
perforation.
Colon. The loaded colon is even more liable to mechanical injury
than the cæcum. Occupying as it does the more lateral parts of the
abdominal floor, it is even more exposed to kicks and blows, and
extending as it does back toward the inguinal regions, it is especially
in the way of blows of horns so often delivered in this region. From
the solid nature of its contents the presence of calculi, the presence
of blood sucking worms, and its implication in the congestions and
extravasations of verminous thrombosis, this organ is especially
liable to degenerations and inflammations which render its walls
particularly friable. Neoplasms of various kinds, cancerous,
tubercular, etc., have been found on its walls as occasions of rupture.
Abscesses of strangles have ruptured into the viscus. Overdistensions
in front of an obstruction in the pelvic flexure, floating colon or
rectum are the most frequent causes of rupture. Again, cases have
been seen as the result of violent exertions, as during straining in
dystokia. It has been a complication of phrenic hernia, of volvulus of
the double colon, and of ulceration caused by the prolonged
ingestion of arsenic. In severe impaction the necrosis of the intestinal

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Movies hold a mirror up to us, portraying the complexities of human reality

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Christopher Falzon is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of

Introduction: Rear Window Ethics 1

1 Excess and Obsession: Ancient Ethics 15

2 Sin and Self-Denial: Religious Ethics 63

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Exploring Ethics Through Film

Figure 1.2 The ‘dual nature of man’ in Mamoulian’s version of Dr Jekyll and

completely unleashed as it is in the figure of Mr Hyde, is hideous, bestial, the

Earthy basis, nucleus, stratification, in cæcum or colon, multiple, size, number

Horse. Intestinal calculi have an earthy basis (ammonio-

The source of the magnesia may be found to a large extent in the

Ash. Mg. in Ash.

The amount of magnesia in each of these grains is amply sufficient

Small bodies, especially playthings, feathers, hair, bristles, bones of prey.

Causes. The dog is especially liable to this form of trouble, in

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