I chose the 1963 movie Lord of the Flies, which is a film version of the novel by William Golding. I selected this film because it examines leadership and ethics at the elemental level, with most of the features of civilization stripped away. I felt this made the issues of leadership and ethics in the film clearer and less encumbered with extraneous factors, which would enable me to make a more compelling point about them.
The two primary ethical dilemmas in the film are the conflict between what is known to be right and what is necessary for survival and the conflict between self-constraint and immorality. As Zimbardo (2007) points out, the boys know that they have to kill the pigs in order to eat and survive, but they are at first constrained by the Christian values they brought with them. The choir boys need to be liberated from their Christian values in order to engage in violence, and the way this occurs is through the removal of the self-constraint that prevents them from behaving immorally; this makes the situation, rather than morality, the driver (Zimbardo, 2007). Once the self-constraint is gone, however, the violence is not confined merely to killing for food; it eventually extends to killing other boys. This change reflects the philosophical concept of the slippery slope. As Murphy and Smith (44) explain, "relationship dynamics characterized by hostility, overdependence and/or power imbalance can intensify over time, in a slippery slope fashion...." Once the bullying starts, it gets worse, eventually escalating into violence, and finally into actual killing. As the self-constraints evaporate, the immorality escalates.
The ethical leadership of moral leaders could prevent or remedy the erosion of self-constraint and the escalation of immorality and violence, but they are absent on the island. Moreover, instead of leadership based on ethics and moral abs
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