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Films

A Few Good Men

Matt Qvortrup casts Tom Cruise as a Kantian and Jack Nicholson as a utilitarian in this Cold War courtroom ethics epic.

“You can’t handle the truth!” Jack Nicholson’s outburst in one of the final scenes of Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men (1992) might imply to a philosopher that this film is about epistemology – how we understand the world – or about metaphysics – the nature of reality. But the truth is very far from it. In fact, this drama about the extrajudicial killing at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base of Willy Santiago, an underperforming and disobedient soldier of private rank, is above all about ethics. More precisely, it’s a showdown between utilitarian (or consequentialist) ethics and its Kantian (or deontological) counterpart.

Rob Reiner, who had previously directed the funny but hardly philosophical When Harry Met Sally (1989), is not a filmmaker usually associated with metaethics, the comparison of ethical theories.

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