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– memories that effectively transform him into another person, Quaid, who has no inkling of Hauser’s existence. To cut a long story short, Quaid successfully infiltrates the movement, but when push comes to shove and his history is revealed, he decides he has no intention of going back to being Hauser, and defends his new identity with all of the gratuitous violence one has come to expect and love in a mid-career Schwarzenegger movie (i.e. a lot more than Kindergarten Cop). Total Recall is a defence of what is known as the ‘memory theory’ of personal identity. What makes you the person you are – the same person as you were yesterday and different from any other person? According to the memory theory, it is your memories that do this. A scene late in the film that sees Arnie break free of a chair to which he is tied and then proceed to massacre his adversaries with the arms of said chair, is perhaps the most stirring defence of memory theory ever conducted. Interestingly, later in his career, Arnie apparently reassessed his commitment to this theory. The 6th Day presents a persuasive case against the memory theory by way of a ‘duplication objection’: the possibility of two different people who have exactly the same memories. In this later offering, Arnie is pushed in the direction of a position defended by the Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit. Each one of us is not a persisting person, but merely a constant and rapid succession of different people housed in the same body. This theory might be rather useful if you have, say, fathered a child with your housekeeper. You can, in that case, truly say to your wife, “It wasn’t me. I didn’t do it!” Alternatively, you might prefer another line of defence: “I couldn’t help
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it. I had no choice.” This is the argument put forward by Minority Report. In Spielberg’s film, Tom Cruise is the golden boy of the pre-crime unit whose job is to stop crimes before they are committed. Helping him is a trio of pre-cogs – seers of future crimes – until, one day, they see a murder and Tom is the perp. Minority Report is an exploration of the philosophical problem of free will: causes make their effects
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inevitable. Everything that occurs has a cause. Therefore, everything that occurs is inevitable. But if everything is inevitable, our actions, choices and decisions can’t be free. Worse still, suppose not everything that occurs has a cause. An event like that would just happen for no reason. It would be random – something outside anyone’s control – and therefore still not free. Third option: causes don’t make their effects inevitable, but they do influence them. But all ‘influence’ can mean is
‘partly inevitable, partly random’ and so still not free. Either way, we aren’t free. Free will is one of those things that we routinely assume we possess, and people might be rather upset if they were to discover that they don’t have it. That’s a pity – because it’s unlikely there’s any such thing. Some think that without free will there can be no morality – and morality is the theme of the final film on this list, an offering in the invisible man genre. Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man is an exploration of a question first discussed by Plato: ‘Why bother being moral?’ Punishment – sanction of various levels of severity from simple disapproval to execution – is one reason. But suppose this were somehow taken away. Would we have any reason to be moral then? Plato used the mythical story of the Ring of Gyges to explore this theme. Gyges, a shepherd, discovers a ring that makes him invisible. He uses it to kill all his rivals and eventually becomes king. In a similar vein, in Hollow Man, Kevin Bacon plays a man who is not very nice to begin with, manages to make himself invisible, and becomes completely insufferable as a result. Cue some uncomfortable moments for Elizabeth Shue, and, of course, a bad end for Kevin Bacon. Just when he thought he had taken sanction out of the picture, it comes back and bites him. So, implicitly, the movie never gets past sanction as an answer to this fundamental question of morality. That’s not just philosophically disappointing; it’s psychologically worrying
Mark Rowlands’ The Philosopher at the End of the Universe is available now from Ebury.