Director Steven Spielberg's full length war movie Saving Private Ryan, is set during and shortly after D-Day. The action begins with the invasion of Normandy but focuses primarily on the eight man mission to rescue a Private Ryan. The war and the mission are, however, merely a back drop for a morality play, a contest between competing moral theories.
The head of the eight man mission, Capt Miller, quickly identifies himself as a utilitarian; a man for whom numbers matter. His morality is based on the concept that what is moral is what provides "the greatest good for the greatest number". In this sense Capt Millar is a consequentialist in that he is concerned more with the outcome of an act than the inherent morality or immorality of an act. This assessment is best demonstrated in the Church scene where Capt Miller is talking with Sgt Mike. Miller explains that he has always rationalized the casualties under his command by the numbers of lives that those casualties must have saved. As this is his expressed yardstick his mission of risking of the lives of eight men to save one just doesn't add up. As he puts it "...this Ryan is going to have to cure cancer or invent a better lightbulb or something".
The fact that Miller continues the mission despite it "not adding up" might suggest that he is a rule utilitarian. Someone who doesn't necessarily analyse the morality of every act to determine if it would cause the greatest good for the greatest number, but rather tends to follow rules that will generally cause the greatest good for the greatest number. In this regard, even if his whole 8 man mission is wiped out this would be preferable to the chaos that might result if soldiers started disobeying orders. I think this assessment is evidenced when after unit member Geparzo is by a German sniper while trying to rescue a child despite Miller's advice against such an effort. Miller screams "We're not here to do the decent thing, we are here to follow orders!" In this regard, Miller is distinguishing his morality from those who believe that morality is inherent in an act rather than the outcome of an act. This is the distinction between a consequentialism and Kant's form of duty ethics.
The unit translator, Cpl Upham, probably best personifies duty ethics. He is a soldier but doesn't like killing - a prime tenet of duty ethics. He follows the golden rule of only doing onto others as he would have them do unto him. Rather that killing during battle Upham merely carries the gear of the other unit members, and on one occasion he even advocates for the life of a German POW. Interestingly, despite the objections of the other unit members Miller and Upham agreed on releasing the POW. Miller from a rule utilitarian perspective and Upham from the perspective of respect for persons and not killing anyone, tenets of duty ethics. This scene perhaps demonstrates that at least in as far as results are concerned, there are more similarities between the various approaches to ethics than there are differences.
In one of the final scenes, the battle for a bridge, there is some very interesting plot twists that I confess I have not been able to interpret. The POW that Upham and Miller let go comes back to kill two of Uphams unti members while he watches and does nothing about it. This same POW then goes on to kill Capt Millar before being killed by Upham, who until that point had refused to kill anyone. Why the change of heart, and what lesson is to be learned from the fact that Upham and Miller let the POW go and was then subsequently killed by him?
In the end, it seems that Miller kept his utilitarian beliefs. His dying words to Private Ryan were "Earn this," a challenge that Ryan struggled with for the rest of his life. The very last scene in the movie occurs many years after the war and has the elderly Ryan leaning over the grave stone of Capt Millar wondering if in fact he had "earned this". He wonders if he has led a good life, good enough to make up for the loss of eight other lives. The answer is yes. If you are a utilitarian you will realize that the bridge the men defended prevented a Nazi counter attack and saved many more Allied lives than were lost. This is the war fighter's morality. Even from a duty ethics perspective I think the answer is still yes. Ryan could have gone with the eight man unit and been saved, never having to stay and fight for the bridge. In this sense he did the right thing and lived up to the golden rule. By any standard, he was moral. Again, this shows the commonality even between different measures of morality.
Seen through the eyes of a squad of American soldiers, the story begins with World War II's historic Omaha Beach D-Day invasion, then moves beyond the...More at HotMovieSale.com
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