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.

Conscience

Volodymyr Denyssenko’s film, Conscience (1968), is set in a small Ukrainian village under Nazi occupation during World War II. Vasyl, a Ukrainian man, kills a German soldier, and the chief German stationed there gives the villagers an ultimatum: Turn in the culprit or the entire village will be liquidated; all of the villagers will be executed. The film is all about this ethical dilemma. According to Jeremy Bentham’s ethic of utilitarianism, the greatest good for the greatest number should prevail; any villager would be ethically justified in bringing Vasyl to the Germans to be executed so that the villagers can be spared. The ongoing pleasure of 100 people outweighs the ongoing pleasure of one person. But the film doesn’t follow this logic, and can thus be looked at as a critique of Bentham’s ethical theory. This is not to say that deontology, operating as an ethical constraint on utilitarianism, is entirely without risk. If I have just lost you, my dear liebe reader, consider this: Going beyond ethical constraints on an otherwise ethical theory, what if, as in the film, a political (or religious) cause is allowed to upend ethical considerations altogether, or at least to eclipse them?  I contend that the villagers do this in the film, for they sacrifice themselves as a matter of conscience to protect a murderer because they value his political cause, which is resistance to the Nazi occupation. At what cost? If in relegating the ethical level our species opens the floodgates to committing atrocities by good intentions, what might people like the Nazi occupiers in the film do without a conscience and external ethical constraints?

In the film, the villagers maintain their silence, but it is clear that they do not view Vasyl as a culprit, and thus as a murderer whom should be turned in. As a partisan fighting the Nazis, the violence that he commits is justified because the totalitarian control by the Nazi chief is so oppressive in the daily lives of the villagers. In a similar film, The Bride and the Curfew (1978), which is an Albanian film about a partisan woman whom the Nazis attempt to find because she has killed an Albanian collaborator and drawn chalk figures of resistance on buildings, the villagers do not view the protagonist as a murderer, for she has dedicated her life to a higher cause. At one point, she says that her life no longer belongs to her, for it serves the ideal of freedom, as in freeing Albania from the Nazi occupation. Several Albanians help her to escape, which she does. Unsatisfied with the original ending of the woman in a horse carriage being chased by a Nazi in a car, an Albanian Communist Party official had the ending changed so the Albanians in the carriage gun down the Nazis in the car, mob-style. It is not enough that the woman is being chased because she committed a murder; we the audience must see her as victorious. Beyond the need for closure, the Albanian official at least needed to see the immediate victory of the political cause.

In Conscience, Vasyl is not so lucky, though the villagers do more than the Albanian villagers do in The Bride and the Curfew for the Ukrainian villagers know that their own lives are on the line. Although there’s no reason to suppose that they have studied the 18^th century Bentham or his theory, the notion of the benefit of the villagers as a whole surviving outweighs that of one of them is clear to them. At one point, a woman tells Vasyl that a hundred souls will be lost because of his refusal to turn himself in, but she will not turn him in even though she is saying that a hundred lives are worth more than one. She, and the rest of the villagers, support the partisan cause against the Germans.

Finally, Vasyl does turn himself in, but the Nazi commander thinks Vasyl is lying and repeatedly slaps him. The commander has the villagers rounded up and shot and then he himself shoots Vasyl and the compliant Ukrainian woman who has been acting as his translator. So Vasyl can be read as finally concurring with Bentham’s ethical theory in being willing to sacrifice his life to save those of so many more. Is it the case, however, that Bentham’s calculus should have the final say when heroism is entered into the equation? The villagers are willing to keep silent. They go to their mass grave without having turned in the partisan murderer, but like Abraham in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, where a divine decree to sacrifice Isaac trumps the immorality of murder, the villagers put the partisan (i.e., resistance) cause above Vasyl being a murderer and thus a criminal to be legitimately turned in. The villagers feel an ethical duty to protect him even if doing so costs them their own lives.

In terms of philosophy, the villagers are deontologists because they recognize a constraint on Bentham’s “greatest pleasure for the greatest number” ethic. In terms of Kierkegaard, the villagers recognize a value about the ethic against murder. Whereas for Abraham, God trumps the realm of morality, the villagers recognize a political cause as suspending the ethical realm such that it is ethical to let a murderer get away with his crime, and, moreover, to violate Bentham’s ethical theory of utilitarianism. A political cause and a religious cause can each, if valued sufficiently, relativize or even vacate the ethical level. Such a cause can be valued so much that a man in one story is willing to sacrifice (murder) his son and an entire village in another story is willing to be sacrificed. Sacrifice, after all, is a noble virtue, but it should not be lost on us mere mortals that there are dangers to allowing the ethical dimension to be eclipsed.

If we are angels, then we must surely be killer angels even with good intentions. Doesn’t relativizing or even violating ethical strictures open the spigot to all kinds of ways to justify unethical conduct? Can our species afford even those lofty causes that we can value so much that the ethical domain takes a back seat or is lost altogether? One need only consider how sociopathic the Nazi commander is, utterly without a conscience in Conscience as he himself shoots his translator in the back of her head. Is not the hegemony of ethics, including Bentham’s insistence that maintaining or providing for the pleasure of the greatest number of people, something we should maintain, given our species’ horrific aggressive instinct? Our biological nature, hardly refined through Darwin’s natural selection, ought not be forgotten as we reach for the sky toward our great religious and political ideals.

The Nazi commander takes advantage of the villagers’ suspension of the ethical for a political cause by committing genocide rather than honoring such a people for acting on principle even at great personal sacrifice, and therefore ironically shows how dangerous it is not only for the villagers, but also then for people like the Nazis to suspend the ethical. The villagers are sufficiently civilized that they can afford to suspend the ethical for a cause without thereby opening the floodgates to all sorts of unethical behavior by them, but the atrocious and heinous conduct of the Nazis that results demonstrates just how much our species needs the ethical constraint. In other words, even though the villagers can bypass the ethical for a higher cause without then acting unethically in general because the ethical dimension no longer matters (even though they are acting unethically in letting the murderer escape), the Nazis’ resulting unethical conduct (without any superlative political cause) demonstrates the need our species has of ethical constraints that cannot be suspended or upended. Notice that having a good religious or political cause does not really make the ethical go away. Abraham is still guilty of attempted murder and the villagers refuse to turn in a man who has murdered another person. Even so, I submit that this is not enough, given our species’ aggressive nature. In the end, the entire village, except for one boy, is wiped out by men of entirely no conscience whatsoever.  

Aimee & Jaguar

Aimee & Jaguar (1999) is a film based on a true story centering on Felice, a Jewish woman who lived in Berlin until 1944 and belonged to an underground lesbian, anti-Nazi (spying) organization. To be a Jewish lesbian in Nazi Germany cannot have been an easy life, with possible catastrophe just around the corner on any given day.  In the film, Felice becomes romantically involved with Lilly, a mother of four and wife to a Nazi solder who is fighting at the eastern front. The film is essentially a love story between the two women. I want to draw out some of the ethical issues raised in the film—with the love story serving as my critique of two ethical theories—utilitarianism and duty-based ethics—that are implied in the film.  

Bentham’s ethical theory of utilitarianism has for its goal the greatest good, which is maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, for the greatest number of people. In terms of distribution, the principle can justify allocating a lot of money to some groups—whose individuals can be expected to get a lot of pleasure out of the funds—while depriving other groups of any money because they would not get a lot of pleasure out of even the limited funds. Invest in pleasure where most of it is likely to result. It is the consequence, rather than the means, that is important.

Under such a lopsided distribution as making what money there is available to non-Jewish Germans, the notion of declining marginal utility means that a lot more money would have to be added to the rich Germans to give pleasure equal to that which would come from giving the impoverished groups even just a little money. The utility of 1 DM, for instance, after getting 99 DM is less than the utility after getting 2 DM. This point is illustrated in the film.

In one scene, a fur-wearing, wealthy German woman, sensing that Felice and her three friends, Ilse, Lotte, and Klara, in the bathroom are hungry, and Jewish, sells them food-stamps for nothing less than 200 marks—an extravagant sum judging from the reaction of the three Jews. Based on declining marginal utility, it would take such a sum of money for the pleasure obtained by the rich woman to equal the pleasure from the mere food-stamps accruing to the four Jews. Hence, the exploitation.

The utilitarian distribution cutting off some people or entire groups from funds needed for daily sustenance can be extended to include outright extermination. In Nazi Germany, exterminated groups included the Communists, homosexuals, and Jews. Felice and her three friends were on the losing end in at least two of the three. It is ethically problematic that Bentham’s theory could be used in such a way to justify investing only in people who are most able to be happy (feel pleasure), whether from inner constitution or by external circumstance. Maximizing the pleasure in a society overall is an aim that can justify means that can easily be viewed as unethical. In fact, the resulting pleasure overall, as it is distributed in society (i.e., unequally) can be viewed as unethical. Fortunately, we can turn to Kant to make up for Bentham’s lapses.  

In contrast to Bentham’s theory, Immanuel Kant held that people have a duty to treat other rational beings not merely as means, but also as ends in themselves. Reason, by which we assign value to things (and people) is itself of absolute value, and so rational beings should not be treated merely as means, but are worthy by virtue of having reasoning capability of being treated as ends in themselves. This version of Kant’s Categorical Imperative is similar to the Golden Rule in Christianity (Kant was Christian). For the Nazi leaders to treat groups of people as means only to a Nazi vision of society and race would be for Kant, unethical.

Yet is it reasoning that gives humanity its absolute value? In the film, Felice refuses to go with her friends on a train to safety in Switzerland because she loves Aimee and thus wants to stay with her; the decision taken is not rational, for Felice must know that she could have gone and returned after the fall of the Third Reich; she must also have known that she would probably not survive for long, even if the days of Nazi Germany were obviously limited. “A catastrophe,” Aimee’s mother says when she learns, after Felice has returned from the train station, that she is not only her daughter’s girlfriend, but also Jewish. In such a context, how much value can we put on Felice’s love for Aimee? It seems to me that reason cannot assign value to such an object of such power, so such value must be undefined, and thus absolute. Means and even lofty ends that slight the human natural ability to love face an uphill fight in claims to being ethical rather than unethical.