Murder on the Orient Express

If viewers can get past Hercule Poirot’s extraordinarily long (and awful) mustache in the 2017 film, Murder on the Orient Express, listening closely to some of the detective’s choice observations on human nature and ethics can deliver philosophical dividends. Indeed, Poirot admits to being able to see the world only as it should be, which enables him to detect even small physical (and psychological) aberrations, even concerning eggs for breakfast, and so he has become, as he unabashedly states, the world’s best detective. After having solved the case on the stopped train, however, he realizes that even his “gift” at detection is not fully in line with how things should be, and so he compromises with his austere ethical standards because he finds himself in a “gray area,” ethically speaking.

At the end of the film, Poirot asks the man who is waiting for the detective to arrive, “Would you please straighten your tie?” The man does so. It is an odd, fastidious request that subtly confirms Poirot’s own admission early in the film that his sensitivity to even tiny deviations from how things should be is pathological, and yet very useful in detective work. So it is extraordinary as far as he is concerned that he says to the group of people on the train, “There are no killers here” even though he has figured out that all of them jointly savagely stabbed Rachett, who had kidnapped and killed (even after having received the ransom!) Daisy, the Armstrong young girl. Sometimes the scales of justice should not be in balance, Poirot tells the group. At the beginning of the film, he says, “There is right and wrong and nothing in between.” So, when Rachett sits at Poirot’s table in the dining car on the train, the detective instantly detects that the kidnapper/killer of the Armstrong child is not in line with how the world should be. Because, as Poirot says at one point, “Human nature is perverse in its complexity,” it is no surprise that he admits, “I am at my happiest when I am alone.” Applied ethics would be an alternative vocation for Poirot, and he would doubtless prefer to be alone than in the company of business practitioners, given their orientation to their self-interest and gain. To be sure, criminal justice is no small matter, given the heinous nature of murder. As the man who invites Poirot to travel on the train tells him just after both men discover that Rachett has been murdered in bed, “You are the only person who can bring justice.” Otherwise, the Black physician would likely be hanged “just because of the color of his skin,” which would be a grave injustice. So the detective agrees to take the case even though he is on vacation.

Rachett has not only gotten away with his horrible crimes against the Armstrong family, which ruined it, but has also caused 12 other people, who were either in that family or in various degrees of affiliation to it, to have their lives, according to Poirot, “wounded, deformed, ended.” This too “demands justice,” and so may justify the joint stabbing by the twelve of Rachett in his berth. In other words, Poirot sees the ethics of the vengeful act as being a gray area, rather than either right or wrong, because Rachett’s original crimes led to the additional crimes of having ruined twelve other lives. Hence, Poirot tells the group that sometimes the scales of justice should be unbalanced. The twelve seek revenge—vengeance—“for the life of an innocent,” Poirot says, “a life for a life.” But it is more than a life for a life, for Rachett has ruined the lives of the 12 emotionally aggrieved people on the train who stab Rachett; it is Rachett’s life for many more, and the criminal justice system has failed to bring Rachett to justice. In fact, the son of the prosecutor who wrongly prosecuted an innocent woman for Daisy’s murder is one of the twelve on the train!

To be sure, the twelve people, whom Poirot admits are not killers at heart, lie to him. “It appears that there is no end to the lies manufactured just for me,” Poirot observes after having spoken with them all. Even though lies violate Kant’s ethic (i.e., the Categorical Imperative), Poirot’s reflection that the joint stabbing may be justified ethically raises the question for us as to whether the end justifies the means (i.e., the lying). As for Poirot himself, he tells the group, “I cannot lie.” That he holds firm on the ethic of honest even as he considers the act of vengeance as possibly justified ethically—“I cannot just this,” he admits—directly contradicts his general perspective that there is right and wrong and nothing in between. His sensitivity to abnormalities from how things should be is clear from his discomfort looking at a man whose tie is not straight, hearing the conductor walking quickly to Rachett’s berth, and seeing the cracked glass of the picture frame of his beloved Catherine who has presumably died. Because, as he puts it, “crime is an anomaly” because it takes “a fracture of the soul” to murder another human being, he cannot resist man with the crocked tie who accosts the detective as he is finally leaving the train and states, “There has been a murder on the Nile.” Human nature is indeed perverse to a man who cannot help but see the world as it should be, and the motive to remove defects must indeed be strong in such a person. That he is confronted with a case in which the scales of justice should not be in balance is itself an aberration that must be intolerable to him, and to such an extent that he does lie to the police as to his theory on the murder on the Orient Express.

“There are no killers here,” the famed detective has said to the twelve when he announces to them that he has discovered their joint, premeditated crime. Linda Arden, aka Caroline Hubbard, the mother of Sonia Armstrong and Helena Andrenyi, and the grandmother of Daisy Armstrong, tells Poirot, of the eleven others on the train who participated in her masterminded plot to kill Rachett, “these are good people.” Poirot does not dispute that. They are not like the murderers whom he has known; they are not like Rachett. In Poirot’s extreme sensitivity to defects from how the world should be, none of the twelve are defects; rather, they are innocent victims of Rachett’s original crime. The sheer anger and emotional suffering in their “wounded, deformed” lives since the kidnapping cry out for justice; that it takes an act of vengeance to bring about such justice, and thus closure, even though the act is indeed murder, defies Poirot’s normative world-view. “I cannot judge this,” he tells the murderers. Perhaps moralists the world over could take a lesson from such humility.

The film raises the question of whether the vice of vengeance, or revenge, may be ethical in some cases. If so, should the biblical passage, “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,” be qualified? To be sure, that that very passage was so obviously disregarded in Israel in the mid-2020s in so exceeding what could conceivably be regarded as ethical revenge by committing a genocide in decimating Gaza and even intentionally killing even children (and for fun!) so the Arab people would not go on there does not justify qualifying the divine decree that vengeance belongs to Israel’s deity alone, rather than to the Israelis themselves. But Nietzsche’s claim that vesting the deity with vengeance discredits the very concept of Yahweh because it also contains omnibenevolence (i.e., perfect goodness, which Nietzsche claims is antithetical to any vice) may need to be reconsidered if Poirot is right that the murder on the Orient Express may be ethical even though it counts as vengeance. For if some cases of human vengeance are ethical in being just, then divine vengeance may not necessarily be inconsistent with perfect goodness. If so, then the attempt behind the biblical passage to get the Israelis to cease being so revenge-oriented may not be as problematic as Nietzsche thought, even though the attempt has been in vain.