Who Are "The Bad Guys" in White Bear

During last week’s Contemporary Moral Issues class, we watched Black Mirror's episode "White Bear". The episode opened to a woman waking up with a headache and amnesia. The disoriented women decided to leave the house in search for answers. However, everyone she sees just films her, not responding to anything she says. Then a random car comes out of nowhere with a man stepping out with a gun. The man shoots at her and she runs. She eventually runs into a survivor who isn’t glued to her phone which explains there is a virus going around making people act strange. After the two of them survive a hiccup while hitchhiking they decide to go to a radio tower to try to get rid of the virus affecting everyone. While turning the tower off, they are confronted by some brainwashed people and the woman is forced to shoot one of them. Except only confetti comes out of the gun, and the radio station is revealed to be a stage.

The woman is handcuffed and revealed to be a person who kidnapped and filmed the death of a little girl burning in a sleeping bag. She was sentenced to have her memory wiped and relive the same day for the rest of her life. What’s worse is that the people take their kids and treat it like family-friendly environment to see someone lose their mind. They end the day by putting her in a glass cage and publicly shaming her, just before wiping her memory and doing it all over again.

This episode of black mirror explores the moral issue of what is considered a fair punishment. All the pain the woman was forced to go through mirrors what she did to the little girl. The woman is given someone she trusts, the survivor, just to have her revealed to be a hired actress making the woman live through more pain. The woman is also given a picture of a girl she thinks is her daughter just to have her revealed to be the girl she burned alive. Both scenarios mimic the pain she put the little girl through by telling her they were her parents just to have them burn her alive. In this sense, the punishments seem equal to what she did so this makes it okay right? This follows the philosophy an eye for an eye.

However, this philosophy is not one that should be followed, not for the criminal’s sake, but for the sake of the people. If you replicate what the criminal did, then what difference is there between you and the criminal. You are getting pleasure from someone else’s misery. A punishment should not be given to satisfy the bloodthirst of the people, but to deter and prevent future acts of violence. A person should not be locked up in prison for the satisfaction of the people, but because they are deemed too dangerous to walk around freely. Likewise, they should be detained to prevent other people from committing the same crime. If people are allowed to take joy in other people’s misery they will inevitably become psychopaths who don’t care about anyone’s feeling outside of their own.

An eye for an eye is an outdated philosophy back when people didn’t have the luxury of putting people in prison. Back then it was impossible to hold people in prison because there was not enough food to keep the prisoner alive so the punishments had to be severe enough to prevent crime, even from people dying of starvation. Therefore, leaders often cut the hands-off people who stole. Now we are advanced enough that situations like these should not happen again. Instead of running away from not harming prisoners we should be thankful we don't need to, and embrace it for the sake of our humanity.