Source Code

Source Code was a really interesting film that dealt with the classic categories that we are currently talking about. The film really hit on two of the three ethics, in my opinion. The virtue that seemed the most prevalent was Consequentialist Ethics. Second to Consequentialist Ethics would be Duty-based Ethics. Between these two I thought the film was packed full of examples that shaped my view on what these ethics mean.

The reason why I felt that the movie mostly related to the topic of Consequentialist Ethics was due to the fact that the entire basis of the movie was to help change a future event for the better. Colter was placed into the source code to find a bomber that had blown up a train in Chicago. His goal was to find the bomber so that he could notify Goodwin, the person monitoring him, so that they could arrest the bomber and thwart him from making any other terrorist attacks. Any actions he did while in the source code affected his time and what happened to him in the code. For instance, when he was instructed to find a gun in the closet, he was stopped and tazed which made him lose time while in the code. Each time he went back into the source code he would become better and smoother, to the point where he caught the bomber within a few minutes. However, his actions in the source code did not affect what happened in reality, at least that's what we were told. When Goodwin finally pulls the plug on Colter's life support, time seems to freeze while in the source code, but then begins to continue after a few seconds. Colter finds out that his actions in the source code did in fact affect life outside of the code. He had sent a text to Goodwin from a phone within the source code, and a few minutes after his passing, Goodwin received the message. Every action Colter made in the source code affect life in a different world. It turned out that the source code wasn't memory reassignment, but actually a type of parallel world creator. This was the Ethics category that I found the most obvious throughout the movie, because it was all about Colter's actions.

 The second Ethics category that I found relatable to this movie was the Duty-based Ethics category. The entire film was about how Colter needed to fulfill his duty as a special type of soldier. Even though he was basically dead, he was kept barely alive in order to fulfill the mission in the source code. At first, Colter didn't understand why he had to do the job of searching for the bomber, but after a while of running the code and hearing about how proud his dad was of him, Colter realized that he had an important job to fulfill. This changed his mind set. He knew that he had to save thousands of people from the bomber in the real world, so he knew that it was his duty as a soldier to find the bomber in the source code and identify him for police in the real world.