Let’s talk about 13 Sins, in which a down-on-his-luck man is presented with a game, 13 actions which reward millions of dollars upon completion. They start innocently enough, making a child cry; to some laughable, to others quite serious. Regardless of this, I want to draw attention to the principles involved. I, as a moral agent, can at best compromise, and at worst surrender my moral principles for financial gain. How do you even begin to put a figure on something like that, do you have a sliding scale of morality vs. currency? Who knows. To skip the drumming out of plot, basically the actions or tasks become more serious in both films, ranging from taking a corpse into a cafe full of police offers to slicing ones own eye open with a razor blade (I squirm at the thought, as I hope you do dear reader). I ask, is it wrong to inflict pain upon oneself, regardless of any financial gain? Arguably the fact that you are being paid is morally worse, as you are allowing other people pleasure as an audience… If it is wrong to perform the act in the first place then it is just a case of how much worse the money makes the scenario. If the action isn’t inherently good or bad, then we come to a much more interesting moral crossroad… Is it the money itself that makes the act immoral, or is it the act of selling oneself?

 

It seems intuitive to say that money in itself is incapable of having a moral position; It follows that it is the individuals with the money that are immoral. Now this is by no means a new idea, the corruption of money is an age old affair, the few controlling the many blah blah (I’ll spare you the anti-establishment rant today!). Once again, it is not this moneyed individual who I am concerned with, but the moral agent themselves, the seller, not the buyer. If money isn’t evil, then it must be the selling of one’s dignity. Now of course there are degrees here, it’s one thing to eat a steak, and another to stab a stranger with an ice pick (Would you Rather); but all of the individuals involved with the game are surely as morally culpable as the other, for taking part in the game. Ah, wonderful, another junction on our journey through the ethics of self-debasement!

 

I ask, is it worse to commit the acts, or to agree in the first place? This is a far more complicated question than it may appear, one which delves into the dark parts of the human psyche… And the 600 words here clearly don’t solve this… But they have tickled the conscience of this film-loving student.

 

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