Flight

With utility and consequences valued so much in Western society at least as of 2012, when the film, Flight, was released, the story-world of the film may seem odd in that doing what’s right comes out on top, even at the expense of knowingly losing benefits and incurring costs personally. In other words, deciding on the basis of conscience even at the expense of good consequences for oneself is possible even in a culture in which “saving one’s skin” rather than doing what is right is the norm. By immersing viewers in a story-world, a narrative with well-developed characters can highlight a societal blind-spot, and thus potentially result in a better society in which people make the effort to re-value their ethical values to the extent that their dominant values support consequentialism above standing on principle even though bad consequences for oneself can be anticipated. In the film, 96 out of 102 of the people on board survive the plane crash even though the metal bird had been in an uncontrolled vertical fall from 30,000 feet. How could the captain not be seen as a hero? If all that matters are results, 96 out of 102 is not bad at all, and being able to get out of a dive even as the tail stabilizer keeps pointing the plane downward is extraordinary.

The captain, together with one of the stewardesses, had been drinking alcohol and sniffing cocaine not only the night before the flight, but also within a few hours of take-off—on the theory that the cocaine would counter the drunkenness and thus render his brain fit to fly. Whip Whitaker is an active alcoholic and drug addict, and yet he had somehow managed to reach the rank of captain. His extraordinary flying techniques tell us that he is a very experienced pilot, and society, like the ancient Greeks, values excellence even as being a virtue in itself. In a flight simulator after the crash, no other pilot could safely land the plane, and yet Whitaker has done just that, in an open field—even having managed to keep the plane in the air through a populated area. So the ethics of him being drunk and high may seem to be moot, given his skill in being able to make up for any negative impacts. Even if there are no such impacts, there is concern that he was drinking vodka even during the flight. It is not just a matter of breaking rules. That he could have put the passengers’ lives in jeopardy may be enough to find him ethically culpable.

I contend that the captain did indeed contribute to the mechanical failure of the vertical stabilizer in the plane’s tail section, and thus to the crash itself. Although not causally related, that he slips on the first step of outdoor stairs, admittedly in the rain, on his way to the plane’s main door tells us that he is not as smooth as he pretends to be. More significantly, to get out of the admittedly severe turbulence while climbing to 9000 feet, he accelerates the plane faster than it should go in turbulence, and then just before “punching through” to smooth air, he accelerates even more, causing passengers to involuntarily lean forward in their seats. The ingested cocaine may be behind his excitement while the plane is climbing while still in the very rough air. Everyone else is in fear, but he is saying, “Ride em cowboy!” He is definitely high in more than one sense of the word. Pushing the plane beyond its mechanical limits may very likely be why the vital screw in the vertical stabilizer broke when the plane was stable at cruising altitude. So the fact that he was high (and drunk) may be very relevant indeed to why even just six people died (and others, including the copilot, were seriously injured).

The series of flying maneuvers that the caption puts into effect during the free-fall is extraordinary; even the co-pilot is not able to grasp why they could work, but they do. The result is an inverted, or upside-down plane flying at a low altitude horizontally until the captain has the copilot reverse to maneuvers to roll the plane around so it can land in a field. This reverse roll is excellent, and the captain even gets the pitch of the plane right. The film can be understood as intentionally presenting the viewers with an ethical problem wherein the captain’s violation of his duty to fly sober and his related choice to fly the ascending plane faster than its limit in turbulence, which, after all, was only severe for a moment and otherwise merely rough may have stressed the vertical stabilizer in the tail to the point of breaking are to be weighed against his masterful flying out of a dive and the consequence of only six people onboard dying. It is admittedly very difficult even for an ethicist to weigh such different factors, especially because good consequences are being put in relation to violating an important ethical duty for pilots. It is not as though religious belief can obviate coming to a verdict in terms of ethics. For centuries at least, the assumption that a person must be religious to be moral held up, though with the rise of secularity and humanism in the twentieth century in the West, ethics has to be taken seriously in itself.

The attitude of the film towards religion is equivocal. On the one hand, when a wing slices a church steeple in half, both the captain and the copilot seem to take the event as a sign having more meaning than would merely ruining part of a structure. That the reactions of both pilots are shown in slow motion suggests that a statement is being made about religion is intended by the filmmakers. In risking the lives of all 102 souls on board by drinking and snorting cocaine not only the night before, but also a few hours before take-off, Captain Whitaker is, as it were, offending the deity. The serious undertone of this is in contrast to the way in which organized religion is viewed through the film’s eyes. After the crash, the copilot, whose legs are crushed so he will never walk (or be able to fly) again, is at first furious with Whitaker, whose drinking the copilot had smelled before takeoff. Strangely, the copilot apparently forgives the captain and even asks him to pray in the hospital room along with the copilot’s wife. The religiosity seems too fake to be genuine; in fact, the copilot is probably using religion to repress his anger at the captain. Also after the crash, we are informed that the small group of Christians who had been outside their church whose steeple was smashed by the plane have been meeting outside every Sunday since that eventful day with the implication being that the field or the parishioners at the field has some kind of ongoing religious significance; the church itself is fine even though it is missing a steeple.

At the end of the film, Captain Whitaker is testifying before aviation regulators on the crash. Even though he is praised for his flying talent and his statement that he had not been drinking or inhaling cocaine was believed even by the chairwoman, he cannot bring himself morally to state that one of the stewardesses who died in the crash must have been coming to work intoxicated. Unknown to the pilot, that stewardess lost her life because she had unbuckled herself from her chair during the inverted part of the flight to save a boy who had fallen to the ceiling of the cabin. She, rather than the copilot or the church-goers who keep returning to the field to worship, represent genuine Christianity of the heart by evincing selfless compassion as if it were a basic human instinct. Whitaker has compassion for her memory and reputation and is thus finally willing to stand on moral principle even though he knows that the consequences will include years in prison.

Consequences, especially those that are beneficial to oneself, do not rule ethics; there are normative principles worth putting before positive consequences. The worth of such principles does not come from merely their function as a constraint on good consequences, for that would be a reduction to functionality. Even the captain’s excellent flying out of a vertical dive (after having flied badly in exceeding the plane’s speed limit for turbulence) does not outweigh even for him the worth of the ethical principle of telling the truth, especially in owning up to one’s own malfeasance and negligence. Film can indeed place an audience in an ethical quandary from which much can be learned as well as experienced about ethical theory. In the present case, deontology (e.g., duty) is not merely a constraint on how much benefit can be ethically sought and enjoyed.

Mickey 17

Ethical, theological, and political issues are salient in the film, Mickey 17 (2025), which is about Mickey Barnes, a character who is repeatedly cloned on a space-ship and on a distant planet. The one-way trip alone takes over four years, during which time Mickey is tasked with dangerous tasks because when he dies, another clone is simply made. A mistake is made when the 18^th clone of Mickey is made even though the 17^th is still alive; they are “multiples,” which is a crime for a theological reason. I contend that reason is erroneous, as is the political, ethical, and theological regime that undergirds clones being expendable. 

In a flashback to back on Earth, a man who represents an evangelical Christian perspective urges lawmakers to criminalize multiples even on other planets because a soul cannot have two bodies. Such a claim turns the soul into something imaginary—an abstraction only. In the movie, that no two clones of a person have the same personality suggests that they do not have the same soul. They make different choices and can even have different values, as when Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 are at odds on whether to kill Timo, a pilot who had been in business with the original Mickey. Both clones have the memories of the original Mickey, yet the two clones have very different attitudes towards Timo. Mickey 18 is more aggressive than Mickey 17, and yet the former decides in the end to sacrifice his life to kill Kenneth Marshall, an autocrat who fixes elections by the Assembly in order to stay in power on the mission. Furthermore, that Kai Katz prefers Mickey 17 romantically while Nasha is really turned on sexually by Mickey 18, and even that Nasha wants both clones for herself as a three-some sexually implies that the two clones are different people. In effect, they are identical twins, and even such twins do not share the same soul. Although not clones by any means, my brothers and I could not be more different from each other. That the clones of Mickey differ suggests that the cloning “printing” doesn’t replicate the DNA exactly. That Mickey 18 is so different than Mickey 17 immediately after being “printed” means that the differences cannot be due to environmental factors. Therefore, the theological argument that two clones should not be alive simultaneously because they share the same soul fails.

The argument that multiples is against the “natural order” also fails because cloning itself is not natural. So if multiples are objectionable theologically for this reason, then cloning should be illegal not only on Earth, but also on colonies on other planets. Furthermore, the argument used that human cloning is a sin, but it can be sued by humans on spacecrafts and on other planets is a non-starter, for a sin is a sin, no matter where it is being committed.  The argument seems to be that if the sin takes place far away from the rest of us, and if the sin has unintentional beneficial consequences, which Augustine claimed of sin in general (for otherwise, our species would have self-destructed), then consequentialism trumps the duty not to sin. In the utilitarian ethical principle of the greatest pleasure to the most people, the suffering of the clones of Mickey can be said to be ethical because the clones’ dangerous tasks make it possible for everyone on the ship to survive. That the same rationale could ethically justify the Nazi’s concentration camps and eastward expansion strongly suggests that utilitarianism fails if the distribution of suffering is concentrated within a collective.

Just as the ethics of cloning for use in dangerous tasks is ultimately answered by blowing up the cloning machine at the end of the film, so too is organized religion eschewed. It is very significant that Kenneth Marshall accidently lets out the secret that the company behind the mission is in fact a church, and that the point of the colony is to create “the one and only pure colony planet,” meaning that the human inhabitants are genetically pure.

The religious auspices make use of political autocracy disguised as democracy. It is no accident that at one point, Kenneth and the audience of his show give each other the Nazi raised-arm salute. Kenneth’s religious hypocrisy extends to his willingness to have the clones suffer even apart from in performing dangerous tasks, such as breathing in a virus in the planet’s air so a vaccine could be made so everyone could venture outside without dying. The callousness of the “church, I mean company,” towards suffering is matched by Kenneth’s willingness to subvert elections to keep himself in power on the planet. That political resistance develops suggests that it is a natural consequence of unchecked power being exercised on a captive population that cannot leave. In the end, Mickey 18 blows himself up because Kenneth would also die. Kenneth had strapped bombs to Mickey 18 with impunity, even though the Assembly was in theory democratic rather than autocratic. It is significant that after Kenneth, legitimate trials began and even Nasha, whom Kenneth unilaterally declared to be a criminal, is elected to the Assembly.

The republic wins in the end, whereas the church and its prelate/dictator are discredited. Although in this respect the film has a happy ending, for the good guys win in the climax, what the film says about the hostility and even aggression that is in human nature even under the auspices of religion is a severe indictment of the species. This indictment is perhaps most revealed in the severe suffering that many of the Mikey clones must endure on the orders of other humans.

Empirically, the Milgrim experiment at Yale in 1968 found that 40 percent of the people in the study thought they were giving severe electric shocks on other people even though those people had been screaming at the previous level of shock, and just for being wrong in answering questions! Ironically, at the same university nearly 60 years later, and fifteen years after I had finished my studies there, two police departments, one under a city government and the other under the non-profit Yale Corporation, plus Yale’s proto-police security guards, kept up constant and overlapping “presence” on and around campus; in fact, by 2025, Yale’s police unit had accepted the FBI’s invitation to Yale to participate in counter-terrorism tactics used on students. The risk of autocratic passive-aggression even just to intimidate by an overwhelming “presence” as a deterrent was real where the film was screened (and where the director, Bong Joon Ho, would speak on May 5, 2025). The tactic itself evinces not only a very negative assumption about the human nature of Yalies (and local residents), but also reveals the sordid nature of those people using the tactics. In fact, the “overkill” in “presence,” which compromised the otherwise relaxed atmosphere on a college campus, can itself be viewed as hostile and autocratic, not to mention disrespectful of students and academia more generally. Turning around, and, as I had to do quite unexpectedly, having to walk off a sidewalk on campus while talking with students and faculty because a Yale police car was driving on the sidewalk on a weekday morning with red and blue lights on, and even headlights blaring, even though the car was only on a patrol, is at the very least uncomfortable and definitely antithetical to an academic atmosphere, where shows of the threat of might does not make right.

Yale security and police stationed outside of the classroom building where the film was screened.

With lights glaring, a Yale police presence "screens" outside after the screening of the film.

More yellow, blue, and red lit-up stationary "patrols" nearby after the film on April 19, 2025

It is interesting, in terms of the theological-political nexus in the film, that Yale was founded by Christian Calvinist ministers who had been at Harvard but would not tolerate the Unitarians having any influence. The dichotomy of the elect (saved) and the rest of humanity in Calvinism can easily result in repression of the latter, as if the rest of us were sub-human and thus needing to be constantly watched (which is a form of passive aggression). In the film, clones are viewed as such by the elite of the “church,” who are not bothered by their respective consciences for inflicting much suffering on the Mickeys even beyond that which results from the dangerous tasks for the good of the whole. Whether in the fictional film or on the ground at Yale, where the movie was screened and the director would soon thereafter give a talk, power without being checked can easily be used by human nature in very unethical and anti-spiritual ways.

The question from the movie is not whether each clone has his own soul, for in choosing to sacrifice his life, even Mickey 18 has a good soul, but, rather, whether Kenneth and his wife have souls, and even whether their “church” is at all religious or spiritual rather than a basis for autocracy being used to conduct medical experiments on clones and construct a genetically pure colony, although presumably with an underclass of servants who obviously would not be treated well, as they would not be among a Calvinist elect.