"The truth is the only thing more powerful than this regime. Demand the truth . . . no matter the cost."
--Esme Carmona, The Purge (season two, episode 10)
The basic premise of The Purge franchise has a high amount of philosophical and storytelling potential, so it was only fitting that the movies spawned a show set in the same universe. The worldbuilding skyrockets in season two, but both seasons inevitably bring up the moral issues of having an annual "holiday" where all crimes except attacks on government members and those using specific weapons are legal for a full 12 hours. While it becomes clear partway through the show (and likely through the movies, although I have yet to view any of them) that the American political party called the New Founding Fathers are using the Purge as a way to manipulate lower class members into killing each other to revitalize the economy and supposedly reduce crime rates, there are far more important issues than classism that come up.
One of the most obvious is the nature of moral obligations themselves. Characters repeatedly attempt to dismiss moral objections to their behaviors by insisting what they did was perfectly legal, as if the having a law against something makes it immoral or not having a law against something makes it morally permissible. Unsurprisingly, many of them switch between clinging to legality or moral ideas as it becomes convenient for them. For example, thief Ryan Grant from season two uses this exact defense on occasion, only for it to be revealed that he left his job as a police officer years before for moral reasons, not legal reasons. The only way that this would not entail ideological insincerity is if he was only appealing to the law in his words in order to hopefully appease someone stupid enough to believe that legality defines morality, but it is never said that this was the case.
Another thing that shapes how certain characters regard the moral nature of the annual Purge is the fallacious idea that there is "science" behind the psychological benefits of the Purge. Confusing fallible sensory evidence of people's brain activity for logical proof, another character from the second season tries to build a case against the New Founding Father party's claim that the Purge reduces violent urges for the rest of the year. Of course, a more collectively intelligent culture would scoff at the belief that science is in any way relevant to whether something is right or wrong or that anything other than valid moral concepts (illuminated by reason) should determine laws, but the New Founding Fathers regard a Dr. Drew Adams's brain activity research on addiction to violence as worth suppressing through killing.
It is very fucking clear that robbery, assault, kidnapping, and rape are objectively harmful or intrusive acts, so it is not as if studies about the impact of the Purge on survivors is necessary to understand logical truths about the nature of violence. Moreover, the way the Purge affects someone's emotions and desires is a purely subjective matter, making Dr. Adams's alleged data that the Purge makes people become addicted to violence all throughout the year irrelevant to its morality. If murder and rape are morally wrong, it has nothing to do with how it affects people's feelings about them. Since the only philosophically authoritative laws are consistent with each other and morality, this is also irrelevant to whether something should be criminalized or legalized.
Moreover, the part of the Purge announcement that specifically mentions murder when stating that all crimes are legal for 12 hours--other than particularly asinine and arbitrary exceptions like using certain kinds of weaponry, of all things--plays off of the pathetic idea that murder is inherently more harmful than actions like rape and most forms of torture. Why else would it need to be clarified that ending someone's life, even with minimal or no pain, is included in the list of crimes that become "legal" for a time, as opposed to something with far more potential to cause pain, like rape or extended torture? Indeed, even when murders are especially heinous, it is always because of some factor other than the mere case that someone was killed.
Still, murder itself merits a special analysis here because of how some people define it. Sometimes the word for murder is defined as "unlawful" killing rather than "illicit" killing. This, of course, would imply that any killing at all, no matter the method or person on the receiving end, is morally valid--or at least morally permissible--as long as it is not strictly illegal. It is concepts that words stand on, however, not the other way around. The moral concept of murder as illicit killing, if true, means that an absence of a legal system or the presence of a legal system that does not criminalize murder cannot make murder valid. If murder is objectively wrong, law is irrelevant. If there is no such thing as objective morality, then law can have no moral authority anyway, and thus any appeal to law is useless in either case.
Murder is among a far broader spectrum of predatory acts shown or discussed in the TV series for The Purge, but it is also at the heart of the show's themes and story. The Purge portrays just one of many examples of what could hypothetically happen if enough individuals in a society pursue blind patriotism, fulfilment of personal desires, and the conflation of legality and morality. A nation of hypocrites and gratuitous carnage is all that fictional America has to show thanks to the Purge holiday, other than money from lip service to the supposed "right" to inflict any cruelty on others once a year. The inflexible nature of any actual moral obligations cannot be changed by having a legal system take a stance for or against it. The immorality of an action and its deserved legal punishment are not matters of preference: evil is either real or not, but social norms are meaningless either way.
No comments:
Post a Comment