Extreme Measures

Extreme measures is about ethics. How far is someone willing to go, and how much we are willing to sacrifice, in order to cure the world's ills. Utilitarianism is defined as the moral philosophy that says we should act in such ways as to make the greatest number of people as happy as possible. In the movie, Dr. Lawrence Myrick is utilitarian. He is taking healthy homeless people into his lab and performing experiments on them for research to help people who are not able to walk, to try and walk again. He thinks these homeless people will not be missed because they basically have no purpose in life. Although, Dr. Myrick’s intentions are good, he isn’t going about it the right way. He’s taking people against their will, their “free will.”

Consequentialism says that we should do whatever maximizes good consequences. It doesn't in itself matter what kind of thing we do. What matters is that we maximize good results. This is what he’s trying to do, he’s testing out procedures on these homeless people. He feels that if he practices on people who won’t be missed, maybe he can get away with it, and help the many people who cannot walk.

Classic utilitarianism states that we ought to always to do whatever maximizes the balance of pleasure over pain for everyone affected by our action.

Dr. Myrick basically sees moral rules only as loose "rules of thumb.“ The Bible clearly states that God created mankind in his own image, male and female, rich and poor. We are all of equal value in the eyes of our Creator. Therefore, the taking of any human life in this fashion is murder.

Although Dr. Myrick's goal to cure a world wide plague is commendable, his methods are beyond moral. Through his distorted sense of values, Myrick plays God, believing it is his right to take life that is "meaningless" if it is to cure disease.

Dr. Guy Luthan goes by Kantian ethics or the deontology principle. According to Kant, the concept of “motive” is the most important factor in determining what is ethical. More specifically, Kant argued that a moral action is one that is performed out of a “sense of duty.” His sense of duty is to help save lives at the hospital.

For Kant, a moral action is not based upon feelings or pity. Nor is it is not based on the possibility of reward. Instead, a moral action is one based on a sense of “This is what I ought to do.”

Guy is very puzzled by a patient brought to the emergency room one night. Naked, disoriented, and bearing a hospital bracelet and a fresh surgical scar, the mystery man is suffering from a baffling variety of symptoms, and though he dies not long after he's admitted, Luthan can't get the patient out of his mind. When he asks to see the records on the patient a few days later, he's told they no longer exist, and the more he digs,