In Minority Report, the pre-cog crime division uses technology that claims to be able to see some commit a crime before it really happens. In Terri Murray’s article “Our Post-Moral Future” he states, “Crime and punishment depend upon free human agency, a cornerstone of liberal democracy. By re-defining criminal acts as involuntary and inevitable, proponents of the new technology merely fabricate a dubious demand for the product they hope to supply.”
As I watched Minority Report, I was disturbed that they were arresting people for crimes they hadn’t committed. Even though the crimes were horrific, they still hadn’t been committed. A moral boundary was being crossed. If someone intends to do something wrong, but hasn’t done anything wrong, should they still be held accountable? Is it still a crime. Murray later states in his article, “In its ordinary sense, a 'crime' is meaningless unless it is done, and is a crime precisely because it is done.” A Crime because a crime once something is done and once something is committed. So it’s wrong, according to Murray and I, to arrest someone because of what they were thinking. It’s different when we arrest people on intended murder charges because there’s a way to prove that they had intentions of killing someone. The whole idea of going into someone’s mind is what disturbed me the most. That would open the door to numerous problems. Where does it stop? There’s too much opportunity to take advantage of this type of technology. Going into the human mind is taking it a step too far.
Please resize You Tube clips to fit the blog. You might look at a scene and do some mise en scene analysis to show how things are predetermined.
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