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Films
The Road
Michael Burke traces the lengths to which we must go to truly love the other person.
Speculating on ethics from the bleak post-apocalyptic 2009 film The Road (based on Cormac McCarthy’s bleak post-apocalyptic novel of the same name) seems like a contradiction-in-terms. After all, The Road recounts the journey of a father and son over an inhospitable Earth smothered in a cloud of dust, where civilization is dead and buried under the ashes. Humanity has become a fast-diminishing refugee species, forced to make brutal decisions in the face of bitter cold, starvation, and roaming cannibals, as the beleaguered survivors eke out what little food remains while avoiding becoming food for others. Why then propose this film as an illustration of the ethical thought of Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), a philosopher who stresses our unconditional responsibility for the welfare of others? In a world where any underlying decency has long ago been squelched by rumbling stomachs, where churches have long since burnt down and ethical treatises have either succumbed to mildew or been consumed as fuel to keep warm, Levinas’s message seems overwhelmingly out of place. Yet it is precisely when the clamor of all the sensible and rational theories of moral obligation have been silenced that his message of an inescapable moral responsibility resonates the loudest.
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