Collateral, Affluence, and Morality

Why "Collateral" Matters

The best art holds up a mirror. It forces us to think behind and beyond what we are looking at, into a broader world of meaning and personal experience.

Enter 2004’s Collateral, starring Tom Cruise and Jaime Foxx. Cruise plays Vincent, a hitman who manipulates Max, a taxi driver, into driving him to each of the murders on his hit list for the night.

Collateral was well received at the time, mostly discussed as a fun cat and mouse action thriller with some great cinematography by Michael Mann. But 24 years later, Collateral is still a film I think about often for more philosophical reasons:

The following is an excerpt from famed philosopher Peter Singer’s recent book. You’ve probably heard of his drowning child thought experiment, but just in case you haven’t, here you go:

On your way to work, you pass a small pond. Children sometimes play in the pond, which is only about knee-deep. The weather’s cool, though, and it’s early, so you are surprised to see a child splashing about in the pond.

As you get closer, you see that it is a very young child, just a toddler, who is flailing about, unable to stay upright or walk out of the pond. You look for the parents or babysitter, but there is no one else around. The child is unable to keep her head above the water for more than a few seconds at a time. If you don’t wade in and pull her out, she seems likely to drown.

Wading in is easy and safe, but you will ruin the new shoes you bought only a few days ago, and get your suit wet and muddy. By the time you hand the child over to someone responsible for her, and change your clothes, you’ll be late for work. What should you do?

For most of us (hopefully), our moral intuition would tell us that we should jump in the pond and save the child. Ruining your new shoes and nice suit is a minor financial price to pay to save a life.

Singer’s point is to then ask why we don’t apply this same logic to our real lives every day - for a relatively small amount of money we could donate to charities that directly save children’s lives in the same way.

A common response to Singer’s plea to get us to help far away strangers is that these are fundamentally different cases. The child drowning in the pond is right in front of us, while the child suffering on another continent is thousands of miles away, a stranger without a name or a face. This line of thinking would say that we are only morally obligated to help those in immediate need, or members of our community-people we know.

In Collateral, Vincent feels the same way. The premise of the movie and Vincent’s ideology (or lack of one) as a hit man is in some ways the reverse foil of Singer’s drowning child thought experiment. Here, instead of saving children from ponds, Vincent is drowning them himself and watching society walk past.

Some of the best parts of the movie are Vincent and Max sparring in the cab over this idea. In one exchange, Vincent tells Max that society doesn’t really care about heinous acts of violence as long as they aren’t affecting any of us personally. Out of sight, out of mind:

Vincent: Max, six billion people on the planet, you're getting bent out of shape cause of one fat guy.

Max: Well, who was he?

Vincent: What do you care? Have you ever heard of Rwanda?

Max: Yes, I know Rwanda.

Vincent: Well, tens of thousands killed before sundown. Nobody's killed people that fast since Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Did you bat an eye, Max?

Max: What?

Vincent: Did you join Amnesty International, Oxfam, Save the Whales, Greenpeace, or something? No. I off one fat Angelino and you throw a hissy fit.

Max: Man, I don't know any Rwandans.

Vincent: You don't know the guy in the trunk, either.

For Vincent, indifference rules the day in an infinite and uncaring universe. If nobody cares to save strangers on another continent, or another country, or another community, then why should anyone care if strangers are dying in those places?

“You don’t know the guy in the trunk, either.”

What’s interesting here is that a lack of community is used as a reason both not to worry about hypothetical children drowning in ponds very far away, and as a justification for Vincent to kill the names on his hit list. Killing and letting die can both be fueled by indifference.

Vincent: Get with it. Millions of galaxies of hundreds of millions of stars, in a speck on one in a blink. That's us, lost in space. The cop, you, me... Who notices?

Vincent asks Max this question three separate times during the film. One of the things that makes Vincent a complex villain is that while he is a murderous psychopath, his philosophical ramblings and questions force Max (and the viewer) to grapple with questions of meaning, responsibility, and morality.

Peter Singer’s drowning child thought experiment has been heavily debated and there is plenty of analytic philosophy examining the logic and structure of his argument, with many debating or pushing back against his strong conclusion. But perhaps his main point is simply that we should extend our realm of moral consideration, and expand our sense of community just a little bit. As Singer says “if we all think only of our own interests, we are headed for collective disaster.”

So…who notices?