I am happy to see this thread as I actually faced exactly this dilemma about a month ago when my girlfriend and I went to see “Expelled”. My girlfriend loved to watch me squirm as I tried to work my way through this ethical conundrum of, on the one hand, not wanting to give Ben Stein my money while, on the other hand, worrying about whether such lying was tantamount to stealing (not from the theatre obviously, as they are getting the same amount in any case, but from Ben Stein et al.).
I eventually decided to buy our tickets for “Expelled” rather than another movie because, as much as I hate Stein and what he represents here, I felt that doing otherwise felt a little bit too much like lowering my moral authority by stealing from him. I thought that the best way out of the conundrum was to send an amount of money at least equal to the ticket price to the group (actually featured somewhat in the movie) that runs the ExpelledExposed website. Admittedly, I haven’t gotten around to making that donation yet…although your reminder via this thread may help kick my ass into gear on this.
I don’t have to pretend. It’s not an option. The friends I mentioned upthread simply aren’t going to pay to see an Al Gore movie, and I’m not going to pay to see a Ben Stein movie.
My family was once asked if we wanted to be a Nielsen’s ratings family. There is really no money in it for us, but we were told it was a chance to influence what is shown on TV. Every Nielson family represents 10,000 families or something like that.
If we had chosen to allow this monitoring equipment, I would have no doubt put on shows that I wasn’t necessarily home to watch, just to bias the ratings the way I want. Sort of similar to the current discussion.
That, I would argue, would be less wrong than what is being discussed.
Just to be clear, I’m not attempting to “gyrate” nor avoid addressing anything. As I said, the question is interesting to me because it would never have occurred to me that there is an ethics question here at all.
First off, to engage in an honest debate, you need to get your analogies right. Similar to what I pointed out to ArchiveGuy, if I took an apple from a grocer’s cart, but told him that I took an orange (that cost exactly the same amount) and the grocer rung it up as an orange, then I think we have an analogous situation. And I only bring this up because I pay attention to your posts as being well-written, informative, and enjoyable. So, I’d be flattered if I could contribute to making them even better.
Now, as a movie-goer (which I’m not; I haven’t been to a movie theater in years), I pay to a see a movie. To be honest, I don’t give a shit about what happens to my money after I pay for my ticket. I feel that my ethical obligation is to exchange money for a service. The theater receives my money, I get to watch a movie. That’s it. Once the money leaves my possession, it then falls into the purview of someone else’s business decisions (and thus, their ethical obligations).
The only other place that I see where my ethical situation enters the question, assuming I lawfully purchase a ticket, is unrelated to movie-going. Rather, it is a question of misrepresentation or lying. That is, I am asked which movie I will watch and I tell a lie. It seems to me that this is easily separated from the particulars of movie-going, for it’s a universal ethics question – is lying strictly and always unethical? As evidenced by the posts from numerous “total honesty” threads (usually as it concerns relationships), the answer is no.
What is particularly interesting to me in this case is that I’d usually argue more on the side of yes, contrary to most. So, I’m attempting to reconcile these views, identifying what and where the differences are. If one feels that lying is not to be universally condemned as unethical, then we’re taken back to specific circumstances. In the specific case of the Expelled movie, I would have no ethical reservations about lying to deprive the movie makers of my financial support.
But you did pay to see the Ben Stein movie. You forked over 10 bucks, got entrance into the theater and went to see Expelled. I suppose you can rationalize it by paying for another movie, but the bottom line is that you valued seeing the Ben Stein movie at $10 because that is how much it cost you.
Allow me to re-phrase: I’m not going to give Ben Stein and his cohorts my $10. Period.
And if the theater had some sort of enforcement system in place whereby if I wanted to see the Ben Stein movie, I would have to buy a Ben Stein ticket, I just wouldn’t have seen the movie.
Of course it’s an option. It’s just one you simply choose not to take.
I would argue that, if (a) was off-the-table, perhaps because of incredibly rigid enforcement policies, you can’t say with absolute 100% certainty that there is no conceiveable way under heaven and earth that you would choose to spend money on the movie, no matter how curious you are about it. Because there is always the remotest of chances that you just might.
You rationalize your decision to see the movie without paying for it by saying that the only two options available to you are morally equivalent anyway. But the only way you can say this is to ignore the very real, and inarguably more ethical, option of paying for the movie you’re actually going to see. This may not be a preferable option for you, but that doesn’t mean it simply evaporates into the ether when forced to evaluate the relative ethical positions of the choices you make.
That would interfere with some other values that one might hold, such as “fighting ignorance.” Isn’t it better to challenge what one considers fallacies in the open marketplace of ideas rather than pretending they don’t exist?
(And I should clarify that this is an academic exercise for me. I haven’t seen Expelled and have no interest in seeing it. My real-world experience lies with suggesting that my friends avoid paying to see An Inconvenient Truth if they had a political objection to doing so.)
But as I said in a previous post, that’s not how a movie theater works. When you go to a theater, it is not to see a movie, it’s to see a specific movie. And if your ethical obligation is to exchange money for a service, then your relationship is not exclusively with the theater (which is strictly an intermediary) but with the distributor of the film as well. The theater doesn’t choose to give money to the studio, it’s contractually bound to do so. So you can say that once the theater has your money, you’re absolved of any further responsibility, but saying it don’t make it so.
Well, the nice thing about hypotheticals is that your assertion is as unprovable as mine. I can claim with “100% certainty” that I would never cheat on my wife or take another person’s life or try to defect to another country. But you never really know…
Let’s imagine that the grocer is selling oranges and apples on consignment. If you pay for an apple and take an orange, the grocer makes note of it, and pays his apple vendor more money than is proper. Meanwhile, his orange vendor is shafted.
To me, this is the central point of the matter. I always find it odd (and oddly intriguing) when I agree with someone’s premises and yet reach different conclusions. (In case it’s not clear, ArchiveGuy, I’m agreeing with much of what you’re saying.)
What’s curious to me, to bring in another analogy, is that I see a correspondence between this and a company asking for demographic information. For instance, I’ve purchased things online where I’ve had to answer some questions about myself. Often, I’ll enter that I’m a 60+ hispanic female. Or an 18 year old eskimo male. Or whatever else strikes my fancy at the time. The whole scenario reminds me of Bill Hicks’ take on marketing.
The fact of the matter is that I have no desire to improve most companies’ marketing data. I don’t view as being a requisite part of the transaction. In fact, I take a small delight in “mucking up their numbers”. I will gladly exchange my money for a product I desire, but my ethical obligation as a consumer ends there.
Similarly, my ethical obligation as a movie-goer requires that I pay for a ticket. That’s it. If I were to watch more than one movie without paying for a second ticket, that would be unethical. But I do not feel any ethical obligation to make sure the theater’s record-keeping is accurate.
Yeah, but if his orange vendor is a bigoted asshole who donates a share of his profits to the KKK, maybe I don’t feel especially guilty about it.
(Besides which, as pointed out upthread, this situation can be distinguished. If I take the orange, the vendor doesn’t have the orange anymore. But if I just illicitly watch a movie, the vendor still has the movie.)
I haven’t seen the numbers, but my impression was that it bombed, even with the core audience. It may have packed them in the Bible Belt, but around here if it was in a theater at all it was in for a week at most.
The movie cost money to make, so unless they got funded by a rich creationist, it is unrealistic to expect them to give it away. Maybe the producer expected to make a profit, but he could have made far more of a profit on something else, so I suspect it was a public service, in his eyes.
I’m against theater owners selecting or rejecting movies to show based on their religious or non-religious values, unless the theater is marketed for a niche audience. Given that, is there any movie that you might want to see for purposes of refuting the premise but which is immoral enough to not want to pay the producers for?
As for me, I’m waiting for it to show up on CBN, and I wouldn’t watch it if I got another Nielsen log to fill out.
Your ethical obligation is to exchange money for the service agreed to at the time the contract was made. If I buy a plane ticket to Chicago but end up in Phoenix, I’m going to be rightfully indignant regardless of the airline clerk telling me, “You got a flight, didn’t you?” Similarly, when you buy a ticket to a film at any modern cinema, you’ll find the name of the film and showing time printed on the ticket. This isn’t just a suggestion; it is what you have paid for and what you’ve agreed to do, and from that, how they distribute the gross profits they make. It may be no difference to you where the money goes to once you’ve paid, but the fact of the matter is that the distributor and filmmakers make money based upon the sale of record for viewing. When you elect to see a film other than what you have paid for, you are abrogating your agreement with the cinema, and by extension, their agreement with the distributor, ad nauseam. To correct your analogy, it would be as if the grocer were working on consignment; for every apple he sells for fifty cents, he owes the orchard owner thirty. When you tell him you’ve purchased an orange (for presumably the same price) he may not be impacted, but the orchard owner has lost revenue.
Making the claim that it doesn’t matter because a film is not a “real thing” and therefore it isn’t stealing (alteratively “they were going to show it anyway, so they didn’t lose anything”) is spurious as well; it may be true that your actions have not resulted in any real cost, but nonetheless you violated the agreement that was made, and the revenue expected in exchange for the experience of viewing the film lost. On this basis one might equally elect to purchase one ticket and view four or five movies throughout a day.
I fully agree the harm is minimal (at least, if done only by a small minority of the viewing public) and that this isn’t behavior that leads to fascism and puppy mutilation. But in terms of individual ethics–that is, agreeing to an exchange and living up to that agreement–we can agree on one point: there is no ethical question here; it is clearly and definably a violation, however modest and practically insignificant. If you disagree so strongly with the politics or views of the filmmakers and don’t wish to grant them any revenues, there is a simple way out of this conundrum; don’t go and see the film.
Honestly, I don’t really care if anyone does this. The film making and distribution industry is so convoluted and innately corrupt that this isn’t even a drop in the bucket. What bothers me is the unwillingness here to simply admit, “Yeah, I do it, and I know it’s (marginally) dishonest, but it doesn’t really matter to me and I don’t feel guilty about it.” Any other justification for this (it’s the cinema’s problem to enforce viewing, the filmmakers don’t deserve my money, I wouldn’t have paid to see it anyway so nobody is losing anything, I paid Paul so that makes it good with Peter, et cetera) is just rationalizing away the central action of not paying to see the film that you watch.
But to assert this is to act as if your choice operates in an administrative vacuum. The theater is not merely number-crunching for its own internal purposes. It takes those attendance and revenue figures and pays different studios proportional amounts based on those figures. This is not some mystery, so it’s disingenuous to pretend that your choice doesn’t have real-world financial repercussions. Again, you can say you’re absolved from any further responsibility once you walk through the door, but that doesn’t make it so.
If you were caught in a movie different than the one you paid for, and were asked to leave, would you continue to assert your (IMHO, narrowly-defined) ethical obligation to the management? Or do you simply make that assertion because you can safely hold that position devoid of any likely real-world consequences?
One element is missing from the moral equations in this thread: the morality of the filmmaker. If I think the filmmaker is pursuing immoral goals, and will use my money to further those immoral goals, then that weighs into my thinking.
To Godwinize the thread: if Hitler were marketing Triumph of the Will to support the Nazi Party, I might be curious to see what all the hubub’s about, but there’s no way I’m going to pay for a ticket knowing where the money’s going.
A Triumph Of Will? Fortunately, history has overtaken the producers in that case.
In general, if I had enough respect (and interest) for a film or book that I wished to criticize even if I disagreed with the premise, I’d pay for it (or borrow it from the library which purchased it from its funds). Curiously, most of those here who went to see the particularly movie in question appear to have gone not out of some sincere sense of wanting to know more or engaging in constructive criticism but from pure recreational outrage over the sort of logical hokeyism that is the hallmark of Intelligent Design advocates. If you’re going to pay for the experience of being outraged, how is that different from other forms of paid entertainment? Personally I wouldn’t waste two hours of my life on this particular film, much less the spare change in my pocket.
