On Movies, Ethics and Morality

Movies can teach us great deal about life and films like The Million Dollar Baby certainly teaches us that and struggles with death. Recently, the Terri Schiavo incident brought the issue of vegetative state to the fore-front of our national discourse and triggered a very passionate discussion on the morals and ethics about the vegetative state patients and if they had the right to choose whether to die or not; and while the national discourse that was triggered as a result of the Terri Schiavo case did not solve the issue of vegetative state nor bring it to its natural conclusion, it did however, lay the ground-work for future resolution to this controversial subject and stimulated a very passionate national debate.

The movie A Million Dollar Baby is a moving tale of one woman’s struggle to be the perfect boxer. Maggie Fitzgerald teams up with Frankie Dunn who takes her under his wings and helps her become a better fighter. After many practices and much improvement, Frankie deems it appropriate for Maggie to go against a former WBA Champion Billie the Blue Bear and Maggie savors the opportunity of going up against such a reputed champion and sees it as a chance to prove her to the world. During the match, an illegal attack by Billie leads to paralysis from the neck down.

In a highly evocative scene, Maggie asks her trainer Frankie to help her take her life away. He refuses it outright but he knows the peculiar situation his favorite pupil is in and thus talks to his priest who says that doing so amounts to murder.

As noted in the Karen Quinlin case, patients in such a state go through a painful ordeal and living becomes a constant torment that death turns into a “convenient” and desperate departure from such an anguishing condition. Evidently, in such a state, a person’s efficacy is rendered useless and thus life becomes, to put it generically, hard. I feel that patients should have to right to, in such a state, to decide whether they should live or die. The argument that doing so goes against morals and elementary ethics is contradictory. No one should have to go through such a painful ordeal simply to fulfill some pre-defined notions of morality and ethics.