Ethical Analysis Essay
Instructions:
This assignment requires you to use Stage One of the Ethical Analysis Essay:
Create an outline as your starting point for writing an essay that analyzes the ethical dimensions of the film you have already selected. If you have not selected a film, please choose from the list below.
Films for Ethical Analysis Essay:
John Q (2002) – Story centers on a man whose nine-year-old son desperately needs a life-saving transplant. When he discovers that his medical insurance will not cover surgery costs and alternative government aid is unavailable, John Q. Archibald takes a hospital emergency room hostage in a final attempt to save his child.
The Jacket (2005) – A Gulf war veteran is wrongly sent to a mental institution for insane criminals, where he becomes the object of a doctor’s experiments, and his life is completely affected by them. The film centers on a wounded Gulf war
veteran who returns to his native Vermont suffering from bouts of amnesia.
The Last King of Scotland (2006) – While in Uganda on a medical mission, Scottish doctor Nicholas Garrigan becomes the personal physician and close confidante of dictator Idi Amin. Although at first Dr. Garrigan feels flattered by his new position of power, he soon realizes that Amin’s rule is soaked in blood, and complicit in the atrocities. Garrigan faces the
fight of his life as he tries to escape Amin’s grasp.
My Sister’s Keeper (2009) – Told from multiple perspectives, My Sister’s Keeper follows the story of 13-year-old Anna Fitzgerald as she sues her parents, Brian and Sara, for medical emancipation. Anna was conceived as an allogeneic donor for her sister, Kate, who has acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL).
Extraordinary Measures (2010) – John Crowley is a man on the corporate fast-track, with a beautiful wife and three children. Just as his career is taking off, he learns that his two youngest kids have a fatal disease. John leaves his job and
devotes himself to saving their lives. He joins forces with Dr. Robert Stonehill, a brilliant but eccentric scientist. Together, they battle the medical and corporate establishments, racing against time for a cure.
Contagion (2011) – When Beth Emhoff returns to Minnesota from a Hong Kong business trip, she attributes the malaise she feels to jet lag. However, two days later, Beth is dead, and doctors tell her shocked husband that they have no idea what killed her. Soon, many others start to exhibit the same symptoms, and a global pandemic explodes. Doctors try to
contain the lethal microbe, but society begins to collapse as a blogger (Jude Law) fans the flames of paranoia.
Awakenings (1990) – The story of a doctor’s extraordinary work in the Sixties with a group of catatonic patients he finds languishing in a Bronx hospital. Speculating that their rigidity may be akin to an extreme form of Parkinsonism, he seeks
permission from his skeptical superiors to treat them with L-dopa, a drug that was used to treat Parkinson’s disease at the time.
Coma (1978) – A young doctor in a hospital discovers that many patients are being induced into comas from simple routine surgeries. She soon finds a deep conspiracy developing that leads her to believe that nothing is as it seems. The comas are deliberate acts to permanently incapacitate patients who are later transferred to a facility called The Jefferson Institute where illegal activities are being conducted with comatose subjects.
Extreme Measures (1996) – A young British doctor confronts a famous colleague about the true methods of his work. The doctor wishes to determine why the body of a man who died in his emergency room disappears.
Gattaca (1997) – Vincent Freeman has always fantasized about traveling into outer space but is grounded by his status as a genetically inferior “in-valid.” He decides to fight his fate by purchasing Jerome Morrow’s genes, a laboratory-engineered “valid.” He assumes Jerome’s DNA identity and joins the Gattaca space program, where he falls in love with
Irene. An investigation into the death of a Gattaca officer complicates Vincent’s plans.
Your film analysis should feature the application of one (or more) of the following ethical theories listed below:
Virtue Ethics
Utilitarian Ethics
Moral Sense Theory (Conscience)
Social Contract Theory
The Ethics of Care
Kantian Ethics
Moral Relativism
Essay Format
Title Page: In APA format, include your paper’s title, your name, and your college name in that order.
Introduction: Provide a brief synopsis of the film that includes the ethical dilemma present in the film. Introduce the ethical theory you will use to analyze the film.
Ethical Analysis: Apply one ethical theory to the medical ethical dilemma presented in the film.
First, describe this ethical theory in your own words, using the readings and course materials as textual evidence for your explanation of
the moral view.
Next, discuss how this ethical theory could provide solutions or recommendations for remedying the ethical dilemma featured in the film. In your analysis, be sure to address the following questions:
1. What moral values are present in the film (as they relate to the ethical theory you have chosen)?
2. Are there instances of moral values in conflict with one another?
3. What moral guidance does the ethical theory that you selected provide the characters in the film?
Reflection: Summarize what you have discussed in the essay and reflect on what you have learned.
Lastly, discuss how what you have learned could be applied to your professional and personal life.
Note: Your essay must be written using APA format, double-spaced, and 4 pages in length (not including title page and
reference page), and written in Times New Roman using a 12-point font.
Please use Ethics for A-level by Mark Dimmock and Andrew Fisher as a reference. It’s available free online at:
https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0125
