If you’ve ever lost yourself in a good book or a dramatic TV show, you’d know what it feels like to cheer on the good guys and hate the bad. But if you find yourself egging on Kiefer Sutherland as he executes his boss to save the country, you have to ask yourself just how far you’re willing to get pulled in.
This was one of the questions discussed at a bioethics session hosted by the Joint Centre for Bioethics Undergraduate Initiative on October 24. Sue MacRae, the former deputy director of the centre, started the session by screening an episode of 24 and discussing the ethical conflicts—whether relevant to real-life or not—that emerged.
“With the world moving as quickly as it’s moving, just a couple of years is a generation now,” said MacRae. “The kind of ethical issues I studied 15 years ago are […] similar, but they’re changing rapidly as our world’s changing and as technology is changing.” For MacRae, media, whether accurately representing the issues or not, can be a good place to get a sense of the emerging ethical quandaries we face as a society.
As a former bioethicist in Canadian and U.S. hospitals, MacRae’s interest in applied ethics intersects with narrative elements in movies, books, and other media outlets. Though plots have changed over time—15 years ago it was Star Trek, now it’s terrorism and cell-phone-era 24—ethical concerns haven’t gotten any simpler.
The issue may be assisted suicide, for example, or the sacrifice of few to save many, or the conflict between private interests and public health. MacRae stressed that these are more than academic questions. They are real-world concerns. In 2004’s SARS scare, for example, health officials needed to make difficult decisions such as what liberties and restrictions to impose on the public in order to contain the outbreak. Is it better to enforce quarantine or leave it voluntary? Do you disclose private information about people for the greater public good? These are the questions MacRae examines.
The complexities of today’s media (the Internet, TV shows, news outlets) can raise awareness of certain issues, but they can also skew our world view. For MacRae, the media is so strongly opinionated and value-laden that it may change the way we see scenarios that are already ethical hotbeds: disability and end-of-life choices, for example.
A study published in 1996 in the New England Journal of Medicine made this point. The study examined the outcomes of real CPR interventions versus those on the TV drama ER and found that on ER the rate of recovery was much higher.
“It is fair to say that many people who watch these medical dramas such as ER get fooled into thinking CPR saves many more lives than it really does,” commented MacRae. “This may lead to a false sense of what technology can do for us.”
In our health care system, conflicts often emerge between patients and health-care professionals over issues such as risky treatments. For MacRae, these conflicts need to be discussed at the fundamental level of value systems and world views.
“I think probably the most interesting thing to me about media right now is that we live in an era where media has made us ask different questions about reality altogether,” said MacRae. Today, the Internet and news can offer us, simultaneously, different world views on a single event.
“It’s like we have a whole different approach to truth,” said MacRae. “What are the facts? What are opinions? And how do we begin to make sense of these competing values and world views?
“That’s where ethics comes in. Ethical frameworks can help us make sense of competing values and help individuals arrive at decisions together.”
