Latest Blackboard discussion forum post from the Philosophy through Film class I'm teaching. It's coming on mid-term right about now. Been through some relatively heavy dramatic slogging, and it's time to lighten the fare, so we are watching Harold Ramis and Bill Murray the K's Groundhog Day:
Time to lighten things up. We've had enough heavy drama, (at least until we get to "Extreme Measures") )Our next film engages a single philosophical theme from some slightly different directions. In "Groundhog Day" Bill Murray's character, Phil, a cynical and bored TV weatherman finds himself living through the same day for an indefinite but quite large number of times. During the course of this very long series of temporal loops, he realizes among other things, that his actions have no carry over consequences into successive days. As it dawns on him that he cannot harm people, it also occurs to him that there are no longer any reasons for him not to manipulate others for his own ends. What is more, as he repeats the day over and over again, he compiles an amazing amount of information about the other folks in the film, and is able to use that information in his manipulations, becoming almost Godlike in his level of knowledge. He is also able to learn a skill, (piano) and use it in successive repeats of the day.
This movie raises a question: If you were given some such power, and were also put in a situation where no negative feedback from other people was logically possible, vis your own actions, would there by any reason not to react as Phil initially does, living it up, and milking the situation for all it is worth? Should you "do whatever you want", to use Phil's own words. Should you treat your life as a harmless video game? Leroy Jenkins wants to know.
Plato asks (and answers) just such a question in the Republic, book II, with his "Ring of Gyges" thought experiment:
...They say that to do injustice is, by nature, good; to suffer injustice, evil; but that the evil is greater than the good. And so when men have both done and suffered injustice and have had experience of both, not being able to avoid the one and obtain the other, they think that they had better agree among themselves to have neither; hence there arise laws and mutual covenants; and that which is ordained by law is termed by them lawful and just. This they affirm to be the origin and nature of justice; --it is a mean or compromise, between the best of all, which is to do injustice and not be punished, and the worst of all, which is to suffer injustice without the power of retaliation; and justice, being at a middle point between the two, is tolerated not as a good, but as the lesser evil, and honoured by reason of the inability of men to do injustice. For no man who is worthy to be called a man would ever submit to such an agreement if he were able to resist; he would be mad if he did. Such is the received account, Socrates, of the nature and origin of justice.
Now that those who practise justice do so involuntarily and because they have not the power to be unjust will best appear if we imagine something of this kind: having given both to the just and the unjust power to do what they will, let us watch and see whither desire will lead them; then we shall discover in the very act the just and unjust man to be proceeding along the same road, following their interest, which all natures deem to be their good, and are only diverted into the path of justice by the force of law. The liberty which we are supposing may be most completely given to them in the form of such a power as is said to have been possessed by Gyges the ancestor of Croesus the Lydian. According to the tradition, Gyges was a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia; there was a great storm, and an earthquake made an opening in the earth at the place where he was feeding his flock. Amazed at the sight, he descended into the opening, where, among other marvels, he beheld a hollow brazen horse, having doors, at which he stooping and looking in saw a dead body of stature, as appeared to him, more than human, and having nothing on but a gold ring; this he took from the finger of the dead and reascended. Now the shepherds met together, according to custom, that they might send their monthly report about the flocks to the king; into their assembly he came having the ring on his finger, and as he was sitting among them he chanced to turn the collet of the ring inside his hand, when instantly he became invisible to the rest of the company and they began to speak of him as if he were no longer present. He was astonished at this, and again touching the ring he turned the collet outwards and reappeared; he made several trials of the ring, and always with the same result-when he turned the collet inwards he became invisible, when outwards he reappeared. Whereupon he contrived to be chosen one of the messengers who were sent to the court; where as soon as he arrived he seduced the queen, and with her help conspired against the king and slew him, and took the kingdom. Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other;,no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice. No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a God among men. Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same point. And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust. For all men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than justice, and he who argues as I have been supposing, will say that they are right. If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another's, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one another's faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice.
Plato essentially argues that there is a very good reason NOT to react as Phil initially does. The answer is premised on the fact that Gyges (and Phil) do suffer 'negative feedback,' not from others, but from themselves, for they persist through the repeated days (notice, very much unlike Lenny in "Memento" who does not persist, and tries to supply a substitute for that persistence with mixed results). Because they persist, their actions impact their future selves, corrupting their character, and ultimately their moral mental and emotional health. For that reason, Plato argues, they have very good reason to resist the temptation to use others as mere means to their own ends, even though there is no chance that in so doing they inflict lasting harm.
How effective do you think Plato's argument is here, and what other messages do you think you can glean from the film?
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