Kehoe: Freedom and Minority Report

In Minority Report all murder has stopped because of the Pre Cog’s ability to predict a murder before it happens. A major underlying theme in the film is the idea of freedom. If someone can be arrested for a crime they have not yet committed then the idea of free choice is an illusion because no matter what a person’s current intentions are, if the Pre Cogs determine that that person will commit a murder in the future, they are labeled as a criminal by society.
Terri Murray’s “Our Post-Moral Future” tackles the same issues as Minority Report but in a real world setting. Murray’s article talks about how new brain scanning technologies are able to predict a person’s intentions. The implication of this new technology is that society will soon be able to predict if a person will be a criminal. It also implies that there is a genetic predisposition to criminal behavior in some people.
The technology in Minority Report is strikingly similar to the technology described in Murray’s article. However, the difference between Minority Report and reality is how the “criminals” are treated. In Minority Report the people who are arrested are treated as if they did commit a murder, they are labeled as a criminal and punished. Murray suggests that the technology described in her article will do the same thing; if someone has a genetic predisposition to crime then that person will be labeled as a criminal thereby taking choice away from that person. Here is where I disagree with Murray, if society were able to predict if a person was going to be a criminal, I feel that the society would treat them as a person with a disease or disorder. To suggest that that would be taking away a choice would be like saying that diagnosing someone with depression is taking away his or her choice to be happy. But of course it does not, it just means that the person with depression has to be counseled or medicated to live a happy life. It is the same with crime, if it can be scientifically determined that a person has a predisposition towards criminal behavior then they should be treated like anyone else who has a genetic or psychological problem.

Cooper Minority Report

Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise, is about a future in which PreCogs exist. PreCogs have the ability to tell the future in relation to when a crime is going to be committed. People say that they are always right, and that if no intervention is made, the crime is definitely going to happen. A police force in Washington D.C is created to intervene before these crimes can be committed. This has caused crime in the nation’s capitol to come to an almost stop. The industry argues that they are so effective that they are stopping people from even thinking about committing murders because they are so afraid. The problem is that not only are they stopping these crimes, but they are arresting and incarcerating these people, who haven’t committed a crime. They aren’t criminals. The crime was stopped. Tom Cruise plays John Anderson, who is the Chief of the Department of Pre-Crime. His name comes up as a person who is about to murder someone. The other name is a man he doesn’t know yet. The story plays out and shows the flaw in the Pre-Cogs.
This industry has made outcasts of people who haven’t done anything wrong. They might have had bad intentions, but by law that’s not enough. In “Our Post Moral Future?” Murray addresses this very issue. The whole fact that the crime is stopped before it happens means that the crime never happened. The person can’t be arrested for something they never did. Murray says that there is no perpetrator nor is there a victim. By calling it a crime, you re-defining what a crime is.