The film One Man's War, produced for Home Box Office and directed by Sergio Toledo in 1990, is an example of the television docudrama, a drama based on real events and purporting to show those events in a dramatic but truthful fashion. The film raises a number of ethical issues related to its story of Dr. Joel Filartiga, member of a prominent family in Paraguay and a doctor who ran a free health clinic in that country during the dictatorship of General Stroessner. The story told in this film raises a host of ethical questions and issues related to different characters and to the social situation itself. The film does not address all of these issues in depth, and indeed many of them are more implied than examined.
The film also raises the issue of making ethical judgments about a different culture, because at some point ethics become cultural. Moral principles are formed through interaction with parents, peers, and the society in which one lives. Ethical problems develop on every line of work and in nearly every area of human interaction. Ethics is a broader subject than is law. Law is the ethical embodiment of a society, a codification of the most important ethical principles which a people believe need to be enforced by coercion if necessary. Ethical principles have a broader application and are expected to be applied even in situations and cases where no law exists. An ethical system is a guide for behavior and for life-decisions. It can be personal in nature or represent the ethical principles of a society. Even when an ethical system does represent the ethical principles of a society, the ethical system in itself is not law and would never be made directly into a legal system. The ethical system instead becomes the underpinning, the framework, for the legal system which is intended to control, adjudicate, and settle disputes and cases where ethical breaches are either clearly involved or where there is some argumen...