The film, Eyes without a Face (original title: Les Yeux sans Visage) (1960), can be taken as a demonstration of the validity of Kant’s ethical theory. Whether or not viewers have studied Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, the film is a good representation that it is unethical to treat other people only as a means. Kant claims that people should always be treated also as ends in themselves. In the film, physician Génessier literally goes into innocent young women with his scalpel, using them as means in his obsession to provide his daughter, Christiane, with skin on her face. She has no skin on her face because of an automobile accident in which her father was at fault. For our purposes, the film's message is relevant. Companies literally have human resource departments and so many states use human beings as expendable soldiers. The very notion of a soldier can be viewed as an oxymoron to the extent that beings having a rational nature are sent out to be killed. It's not like having a flee killed. The film provides us with a great service in bringing Kant’s ethic to us, if only in that we don’t to read the philosopher's recondite ethical treatise (though Hegel's books are even more difficult).
Génessier tells Christiane that
everything that he is doing, all the (as he later admits) terrible things, he
is doing for her good. He also says that if he succeeds, the benefit would be “beyond
a price.” Whereas for Kant, reason, or beings having a rational nature (such as
us), has absolute value because we use reason to assign value to other things,
the devious physician treats his daughter’s good as being absolute. This
difference is crucial in terms of ethics. For Kant, rational beings deserve to
be treated not just as means to someone’s goal (or interest), but also as ends
in themselves precisely because being rational is of absolute value. What about
when we don’t think (or behave) rationally? Kant would say that we still have a
rational nature, and thus are worthy of being respected by other rational
beings not just as means to another’s desire.
Does Génessier use reason—does he
think rationally—in removing skin from two young women’s faces and grafting the
skin on his daughter’s skinless face? I contend that the father does so because
he has a strategy by which to achieve the good, which for him his daughter
having a pleasant life. At one point in the film, it looks like the latest skin
transplant will work. He tells his daughter that he would pay for her to take a
vacation so she could enjoy life after having lived so isolated for so long. He
uses the young women and potentially a vacation as means to his daughter’s
good, and in this way he is using reason. It is quite another question whether
he is being ethical. It is easy to see that he is not an ethical man.
In short, he uses people. Besides
the two young women whom he kidnaps and operates on to give their skin to his
daughter, he is using Gabrielle as an accomplice and nurse; he had fixed her
face, so she feels obligated to do unethical things for him. Interestingly, the
police also use someone in the film. Specifically, the police inspector uses a
shoplifter as bait to catch Génessier. The inspector is not very concerned about
treating the woman as an end in herself, hence he puts her at risk, as if the
misdemeanor justifies doing so.
Christiane is the protagonist, and
even the heroine, in the film, in resisting her father’s strategy. Whereas he
admits that he has done terrible things but they are justified because they
serve his daughter’s good, Christiane feels guilty in her new skin during the
weeks when it lasts. Génessier remarks that her face looks angelic, but she disagrees.
Interestingly, she says that it seems like the experience seems from the
beyond. This allusion to religion seems at first out of place, especially given
her father’s horrors. But her true, internal angelic nature comes
through at the end when she kills the nurse to free the shoplifter. In fact,
she goes on to free the dogs and white birds. Like them, she has felt as if she
were in a cage. Her father hadn’t bothered to ask her whether she consented to
his sordid strategy of abducting young women for their facial skin. In the end,
she walks outside, past her dead father whom the dogs have attacked. One of the
white birds sits comfortably on one of her arms. She is as though an angel come
to liberate the oppressed, which includes herself, and in so doing see that the
wicked are punished. Divine retribution. Indeed, Kant’s formulation of his
categorical imperative in which the means/ends dichotomy is salient resembles
the neighbor-love of Christianity. In other words, the Golden Rule involves treating
other people not just as means to one’s own designs, but, rather, how one would
want to be treated. Presumably no one wants to be treated only as someone else’s
means to their goals. Of course, the difference between Kant’s imperative in
this formulation and the Golden Rule is that rational nature is the grounding
of the former whereas the soul, and ultimately God, is the basis of the latter.
Benevolentia universalis, which Augustine imparts as he emphasizes
having a good will (benevolentia), is essentially love, which transcends
ethics. The bad doctor Génessier does not love the young women whose skin he
flays as a means to providing his daughter with a face. His love suffers for
want of universalis.
In Kantian language, which
relates to the Golden Rule but is not itself religious, we might say that those
who have a rational nature but do not treat others of the same nature as ends
in themselves, but only as means, do not themselves deserve to inhabit a rational
nature. We could even suppose that it is not rational enough to devise unethical
(i.e., means only) means involving beings having a rational nature, so Génessier can be seen as not reasoning well—not
partaking sufficiently in his innate rational nature—in devising his strategy;
even his notion of the good fall short in being confined to his daughter’s
happiness. To evoke another of Kant’s formulations of his ethical imperative, a
person’s maxim or policy for action should be universalized without falling
apart in absurdity. The (theory of the) good that the ethic serves should also
be universal, as in the good of humanity, or, more precisely, beings having a
rational nature.
But such abstractions are not
necessary for film to be an excellent medium for conveying ethical dilemmas and
even relating them to religious themes that transcend ethics. It is enough that
the viewer sees Génessier use other human beings so atrociously and then sees Christiane
reject her father’s unethical conduct even though she herself stood
(potentially) to gain from it. In the rejection and the demise both of Génessier
and his assistant, we see the value in Kant’s ethical dictum that we should respect
other people as ends in themselves even while we are using them for our own
purposes.
Even if a person stands to
benefit, such as a stockholder benefitting from a higher dividend, as managers use
employees without taking into account that they have lives outside of work, the
ethical obligation is to oppose such unethical business conduct and favor lower
dividends. I refused a doctorate in business ethics because there were no
ethics courses in philosophy in the program. At the very least, a seminar on
Kant should be required of anyone who claims to be a scholar of business
ethics. Bentham’s utilitarianism and Rawls' theory of justice also warrant coursework.
I stood to benefit from that doctorate, but I could not regard myself as a
scholar of business ethics (i.e., business, government, and society). Fortunately,
I switched to the humanities—to historical moral, political, and ethical
thought—but I did so in their own right—treating such thought as an end in
itself rather than as means to understanding business (even though I still have
a BS and MBA).
The value in going beyond rational nature to treat things as having value in themselves rather than merely functionally or in line with one’s self-interest goes beyond Kant’s theory of ethics, and yet the dynamic is consistent with Kant’s theory in broad outlines. Christiane kills the nurse and thereby consciously ends any chance of getting skin because like Luther at the Imperial Diet of Worms, she finally says, in effect, Here I stand; I can do no other. I submit that even a principle can be treated as an end in itself, as partaking in absolute value, relative to egoist desire. But is it reason that assigns such value, or might feeling also be involved? Luther was probably acting on feeling, and Christiane has clearly had enough. Kant’s theory relies solely on reason; Hume’s ethic and even Adam’s Smith’s economic theory do not.
