Ethics In Air Force One

Nothing brings concepts and ideas to life like a well made film. Movies can be an interesting way to highlight ethical issues and illuminate historical events, policies, and conditions. It allows complicated concepts and ideas to be presented in a way that people can digest. In this paper, the writer will look at three schools of philosophy and examine how each applies, or does not apply, to the 1997 movie “Air Force One” starring Harrison Ford.

Three of the primary schools of ethics include virtue, teleological and deontological ethics. According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, virtue ethics is primarily concerned with traits of character that are essential to human flourishing, not with the enumeration of duties. Teleological ethics is

Both the protagonist, President James Marshall and the antagonist, Ivan Korshunov, have a strong moral compass when it comes to what they each feel is his duty and the duty of, or to, his country. For both, their morality is based on the end goal. The beginning of the movie shows President Marshall is speaking at a dinner where he breaks from his scripts and says the following: “Let's speak the truth. And the truth is, we acted too late. Only when our own national security was threatened did we act… How dare we? The dead remember. Real peace is not just the absence of conflict, it's the presence of justice. And tonight I come to you with a pledge to change America's policy. Never again will I allow our political self-interest to deter us from doing what we know to be morally

The President has ordered that they will no longer take a sideline on atrocity. They will act for justice. As the movie goes through, the President kills a number of people in attempts to retake his hijacked plane. He orders the release of a prisoner to prevent the murder of his family. He takes many actions that are morally wrong in order to save the day, as it were. The primary antagonist takes much of the same route. He hijacks a plane to take the United States President hostage, menacing most of the people onboard and on the ground attempting to negotiate with him as well as killing several people to get his way. From his point of view, he is doing these immoral things to achieve a moral goal: the release of his comrade from an unjust prison sentence. The Vice President also shows similar morals when she is presented with an action in which she can override the President’s order, which would be the right step on a global scale but she feels is the wrong measure. By not overruling the President, she is breaking national policy but she believes that the outcome would be too dire. She chooses to refuse to take action and trust the judgement of the President, as well as do what she can to save his