Forbidden

The early film, Forbidden (1932), asks the viewers to sympathize with a married politician and his mistress, who together have a “love child,” even though the politician, as a governor, finally follows his conscience and admits to the decades-long affair. Lulu, the mistress, selflessly remains alone and hidden from public view so Bob can climb the political ladder without scandal. At one point, Bob offers to leave his wife, Helen, and leave with Lulu for a shared life somewhere else, but Lulu refuses for the sake of Bob’s career in politics. She places his interests above her own. The film’s attitude toward the “cheater” and his mistress ethically is complex, as is human nature itself. The film presents the complexity that can go with some, but certainly not all, ethical controversies.

Because Lulu acts so selflessly in putting Bob’s interests ahead of her own, the affair comes off as ethical even though Bob’s wife is harmed by her husband’s infidelity. But is she? Bob and Lulu are successful in keeping their affair a secret, so it can be said that what Helen doesn’t know doesn’t hurt her. On the other hand, that Bob is cheating sexually on her is in itself unethical, as it involves infidelity both sexually and in lying to her.

Next to the affair, Lulu’s contrived marriage to Holland, a newspaper editor as ambitious as Hildy Johnson the later film, His Girl Friday (1940), so Holland will not publish a front-page article on Bob’s affair and love-child with Lulu, seems unethical on Lulu’s part. As in the character Ralph Bellamy plays in His Girl Friday, Holland is duped by a woman who loves someone else. In His Girl Friday, Hildy still loves Walter Burns, played by Cary Grant; in Forbidden, Lulu still loves Bob. Holland discovers the truth not only about the decades-long affair, but also why Lulu has just married him. To stop him from exposing Bob, who is by then the governor, Lulu shoots Holland. She is eventually pardoned by Bob, who “comes clean” to his conscience by writing on his deathbed that he has loved Lulu and has a daughter by her. Again selflessly, Lulu throws away the letter just after Bob’s death. She is again acting on his behalf. She really does love him, which makes the affair seem ethical, especially because Helen never learns of the affair, but Lulu’s reason for using Holland by marrying him without loving him is clearly shown to be unethical because she has hurt him greatly. Of course, murdering him is unethical too. Lulu’s role as a mistress and even Bob’s cheating on his wife come out as relatively ethical even though both Bob and Lulu are behaving unethically in their affair.

Typically, characters in a film who are having an affair are portrayed as bad people. Not only is the act portrayed as unethical; the adulterer and the accomplice are viewed as not being virtuous in character. Forbidden presents its audiences with a different take. To be sure, the affair itself is not portrayed as ethical in itself; rather, Bob and Lulu are presented as worthy of sympathy even though they go decades without paying heed to conscience. Were cheating itself, whether on a boyfriend or girlfriend or husband or a wife, approached in the film as not being unethical, the film would (hopefully) suffer from not be credible, for infidelity (i.e., lying) in an emotionally intimate relationship is indeed very unethical, even if the lies hold up and thus are not revealed. Lying itself takes a toll on the victim nonetheless, as the person lying can only be so intimate emotionally, and a significant other deserves more.

Therefore, it is interesting that Lulu’s selflessness is portrayed as virtuous even though she is enabling Bob to cheat on his wife. Even Bob comes off as virtuous on his deathbed as he finally bows to his conscience and writes to make public not only the affair, but the existence of his daughter with Lulu. It would be quite different were Bob and Helen to have agreed to have a sexually open relationship, assuming mutual consent rather than Bob claiming to be “polyamorous” as an excuse to have sex separately with emotional attachment or connection with other people outside of the relationship. The film’s complex attitude toward Bob and Lulu ethically does not excuse infidelity itself, which makes the film’s sympathetic portrayal of Lulu and even the affair interesting; it is as if Helen were not hurt at all because she never discovers Bob’s infidelity—though I suspect that on some level she intuits it and so the marriage is harmed nonetheless in terms of emotional intimacy.

A cheater cannot really “have his or her cake and eat it too.” At Bob’s deathbed, Lulu and Bod realize the toll that their ongoing arrangement has taken on both of them—that they were not able to have it both ways—Bob remaining married while he and Lulu continue their relationship on the side. Lulu finally realizes that she had been stubborn in refusing Bob’s offer to leave his wife, and Bob admits that he has been unhappy acting contrary to his conscience. In the end, both characters come off as ethical even though what they did for decades is itself highly unethical. Good people can act unethically.

Love, especially theological love but also falling in love, is neither a virtue nor an ethical principle. The slogan, “All is fair in love and war,” wherein the opposite of love is actually indifference rather than anger, gets at this point. The sort of deep, even profound love that is sourced in an existential connection between two people, or a person and the divine, is not in the domain of ethics. In Forbidden, Bob and Lulu have such a strong connection that they cheat on Helen so not to have to part ways. Holland loves Lulu, though his connection to her is not as strong as Bob’s is; even so, Bob, in feeling betrayed by Lulu because she has married him not out of love, but, rather, so Holland, an ambitious journalist, would not ruin Bob’s governorship by exposing the decades’ long affair, intends to hurt Lulu by running the story on the newspaper’s front page. Generally speaking, if a person is unfortunate enough to fall in love with a person who is in love with another person more, it is better to walk away from the person (and the connection) than to constantly fight against the gravitational force of the beloved’s other, deeper relationship. Being the person “settled for” when the beloved is in love with someone else can result in unethical conduct out of resentment, jealousy, and sheer emotional hurt. Ironically, love can cause good people to act unethically because love is on a deeper level than are ethics, which are oriented to conduct, which in turn is relatively superficial (i.e., on the surface). 

I suppose the bottom line is that human nature craves the sort of existential connection that occurs naturally rather than by will or intention. Magnifying the value of such love, the automatic or natural bonding can be quite rare. Ethical judgment can thus be subject to the strong gravitational pull of what may seem like a black hole at the center of a person who is in love; not even light can escape from such a hole. To face severing such a connection must surely seem like sheer hell; behaving unethically to keep from losing an existential connection or because the connection is unrequited by the other person can seem like a small price to pay in knowingly violating conscience. The medium of film can indeed bring the human condition to light. 

The Children Act

I contend that religion and science are two distinct and unique domains, and thus qualitatively different. It follows that they have their own distinctive criteria, which are rightly hegemonic in their respective domain. In other words, the criteria of religion should not be extended onto the domain of natural science, especially if in doing so the native criteria of science are eclipsed or overridden. Likewise, the criteria of science should not be superimposed into the domain of religion, especially if at the expense of the sui generis criteria of religion. The film, The Children Act (2017), demonstrates the problems entailed in imposing religious criteria onto medical science. An interesting question from having seen the film is whether any such hypertrophy of one domain’s criteria onto another domain inevitably incurs a narrowing of perspective and a corresponding warping of judgment.

The film’s narrative centers around Fiona Maye, a judge in Britain, and Adam Henry, a 17-year-old who has leukemia. From the standpoint of medical ethics and religion, the first half of the film is salient, whereas the second half centers around Adam’s infatuation for Fiona and her efforts to distance herself from him. The infatuation is likely a result of the fact that he has lost his religious grounding due to Judge Maye’s order that him be given a blood transfusion in violation of the dogma of the Jehovah Witness sect of Christianity. It is precisely that transfusion that is the legal/moral/religious issue that is presented in the film. If as I contend the medium of film is an excellent means of bringing to people matters of ethics and theology (and philosophy generally), then delving into the complex issue before the court in the film is warranted.

Adam’s parents have asked the court to stop the hospital from giving Adam a potentially life-saving blood-infusion, without which he would die (as the film’s end demonstrates). The parents’ lawyer presents the theological position of Jehovah’s Witnesses against blood transfusions. Genesis, Leviticus, and even Acts are cited as scriptural support, but no passages are cited before the court. The theological potential of the film would be strengthened were even a bit of exegesis presented to the judge (or she could be shown studying the matter at home, especially as her husband is away having an affair). The lawyer for the hospital points out in court that blood transfusions did not exist in ancient times, so we can infer that the relevant scriptural passages are at best indirect, being on blood itself as necessary for life. The hospital lawyer points out that if blood is tantamount to life itself, then the sect should be heartily in favor of blood transfusions to continue life.

Even though no reference to blood transfusion itself is in the Bible, the Jehovah Witness religious organization denounces the medical treatment as if God prohibits it. In court, Adam’s father says that he knows this, but in matters of religious, belief, and thus faith, rather than knowledge sans doubt applies. The notion that blood is or carries a person’s soul, which is implied in the sect’s position, conflates the material and spiritual, and in terms of domains, the biological and the religious. Conflating different domains can indeed lead to such astonishing claims that a person’s soul is in one’s blood. Typically, people dismiss such a claim without realizing that the underlying problem is a category mistake in terms of conflating two different domains or hyperextending one onto another.

Even were scripture to proscribe blood transfusions in particular and explicitly, rather than by an assumed inference from a passage on blood, such a prohibition would be of minor importance given the leitmotif of the gospels. In them, Jesus does not mention transfusions of blood; nor does he mention abortion or gay marriage, yet that hasn’t stopped some Christians from treating such ethical issues as foremost and as religious in nature. This is not to say that transfusions, abortions, and gay people marrying are ethical or unethical. Instead, my point is that from a religious standpoint generally and from the perspective of the New Testament, those issues are not particularly salient. Before the judge’s ruling, Adam is worried that his Church would disenfranchise him were he to get an infusion even if against his will! Even just to distance a member on the basis of an ethical issue that carries little or no distinctly religious importance, especially given the salient feature in the gospels of compassion where it is least convenient (i.e., to detractors, outsiders, and even enemies), incurs a bias in terms of perspective and judgment. Treating a minor factor as though everything hinges on it is to judge erroneously. To violate the theological principle of caritas seu benevolentia universalis (love as universal benevolence) under the rubric of Christianity and especially on a theologically minor issue incurs hypocrisy. The sick are to be cared for—this is very evident from the gospels. Magnifying some passages on blood (rather than more specifically on transfusions as if that practice were proscribed) such that the prohibition eclipses the main theological thrust of the gospels demonstrates a lack of good judgment (and common sense).

Because the transfusion would likely forestall Adam’s eventual death from the cancer means that, as Judge Maye declares from the bench, the Jehovah’s Witness organization was acting against rather than in line with Adam’s welfare. Something had gone very wrong in the governance of that organization. Adam’s welfare includes the happiness that continuing to live can make possible; a religious institution that is in favor of precluding a person’s future is likely making a category mistake underneath—in this case, extending religious criteria onto medical science at the expense of that domain’s own criteria.

As Fiona realizes when she visits Adam in hospital before her verdict, he is a lively, precious young man full of a lively spirit, which is shown in his sarcastic grin even more than in his blood. A person’s soul—isn’t it through a person’s eyes anyway? A person’s entire being is the “form” of one’s soul, as evinced especially in tone of voice and facial expressions as well as the language that one uses. The role of blood is biological, and thus of science, in human life, whereas the spiritual transcends the limits of human thought, perception, and emotion. The religious domain can thus be understood to be distinct from that of natural science.

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.