Hunger Games: WWJD?
“Survival is not the highest good.”
Doug Wilson tackles contrived ethical dilemmas in his review of The Hunger Games.
There are ethical dilemmas, and then there are the phony baloney ones. The famous National Lampoon magazine cover did not pose a genuine ethical dilemma—buy this magazine or we shoot the dog.
Many years ago I was working on a television show with the local PBS station at WSU, and Nancy and I were invited over to dinner by the producer and his wife. They were very gracious, and we enjoyed our time with them. But one of the events of the evening that turned out to be a dud was when our host brought out a game which was called, I think, Scruples. Something like that. At any rate, the point of the game was that you drew a card that dealt you some kind of ethical thumb-sucker from a stack of ethical conundra, to make up a funny-sounding plural. If you are stuck in a lifeboat, and you will most certainly die if you don’t do something, do you eat the fat guy or the skinny guy first? That kind of thing. You were then supposed to say something like whoa, and think about it for a while, twisting in the wind. I can really see how a living room full of wealthy relativists in an upscale neighborhood in the eighties could really be flummoxed by the game, but we were no fun at all. There are certain things you just don’t do because the Ten Commandments were not suggestions, and the game is over.
This said, The Hunger Games specializes in a similar kind of elaborate set-up for situation ethics.
