Blog 13: Minority Report Response

The argument "does everything happen for a reason?" is a universal one; ranging from physchological, theological, and biblical concepts. The same argument is soon followed after with the underlying question: "If the future really is predetermined, where would a human's free will take part in it?" The belief in fate is especially tested in the movie Minority Report, where the futuristic police force "Precrime" seek out to execute and eliminate murder before it's even committed.

Although the world of Minority Report is a world where an individuals actions are foretold before they even take place, where does that leave room for choice or circumstance? I believe that the future is capable of being altered by these two factors, unlike Lemar Burgess, the creator of the PreCrime system, who believed that using the Precogs (beings  that could see into the future) was the best solution to end crime even though it wasn't foolproof. For instance, (using an example from the movie itself), at the beginning of the film, when a ball is about to roll off the desk and main character John Anderton (Tom Cruise) stops it before it hits the floor. Anderton's precise actions to stop the ball from hitting the floor causes character Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell) to question him. Witwer asks Anderton how he was so sure that the ball was going to hit the floor, which Anderton quickly answers saying that the ball's future was predetermined and he was only trying to prevent it from falling.

Even though Anderton was probably right about the ball having fallen to the floor because it doesn't have the ability to make a decision or change its course; but for argument's sake, what if the ball had rolled to a stop at the edge of the desk? Or something had cushioned it's fall? That's exactly what I mean to explain in my position for applying ethical considerations in actions to reduce dangerous crime. The ball rolling off the desk situation is similar to the law enforcement in the movie Minority Report. In the movie , criminals are "haloed" (almost equivalent to a what we would call a prison in the present day) before they commit a crime without a trail. However, the audience goes unaware of the hole that has been overlooked in the Precrime system. As the movie progresses, the audience then comes to the realization that the Precogs predictions aren't one hundred percent accurate, and that a number of the people who have been imprisoned had a minority report (a report of that person's alternate future if they chose not to go through with a crime) which were contained in the most powerful precog, Agetha. This means that some of the criminals who were imprisoned before they could even make their decisions might have changed their minds and not have gone through with the crime at all.

Despite Lemar's intentions of having a world with no murder, I believe that the Precrime system doesn't make a just and moral society.  A society that isn't fair to it's members is a corrupt one, and if I were to put myself in the position of a criminal who had a change of heart at the last minute, I'd probably go my entire life living through a punishment that I didn't deserve. Although Precrime's prominent success was preventing murderous crimes and putting criminals away before the actions were committed, the fact that the criminals didn't even get to make the choice of even committing it was also it's greatest downfall.