“I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”

When it comes to Sony’s “The Interview” (last years crazy controversial film), the decision to produce a film with the plotted execution of a dictatorial leader in a country that already has less than great relations with the United States, and then to present this film as a comedy on top of that, obviously poses some ethically based questions. But, we aren’t going to focus on how ethically questionable the film it self was, because well, that would take many days, and many post and lots of coffee. Instead, I want to delve in to the way Sony handled the situation of releasing/not releasing/dealing with threats conundrum.

 Ultimately, Sony ended up delaying the release of the film due to threats received by a hacker group (known as The Guardians) who threatened to expose emails, personal information and, oh yeah, blow up theaters which decided to play the film. So, did Sony do the right thing in delaying release of the movie? On the surface, yes of course, when threatened by acts of homicide wouldn’t you stop your initial plans? But, if we flip how we look at this, we can argue that Sony deciding to not show the film when they intended, due to the threats received, this looks like a pretty acceptable case of freedom of speech being thrown out the window because someone doesn’t agree with what we have to say, now that doesn’t seem acceptable, does it? Viewing the situation from that lens, was it ethically sound for Sony to cancel "The Interview"? I’d have to say that given our society’s implementation and support of upholding an American’s freedom of speech under our first amendment this was a not so sound decision because Sony forfeited their rights due to an external opinion. Now, this is just one way to look at it, of course there are many things to be considered within this situation, so perhaps it’s safe to go with a pluralistic view. There are competing values present in the situation of “The Interview”; such as, North Korea's anger (rightfully so) at the film for how degrading it is towards their country, and the fact that the U.S. felt it was okay to produce a film that depicted the murder of another country’s leader. And of course, we have America’s view that we have a right to present our thoughts and speech in a multitude of ways, despite popular agreement or not, kind of like a “I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” (Evelyn Beatrice Hall) attitude.  
When it comes to free speech you wouldn’t expect there to necessarily be an ethical component attached to it, because freedom of speech is supposed to allow individuals to relay their opinions, and thoughts without judgement and censorship but, I guess in some cases there can be ethical attachments depending on how enormous the audience the person/organization is relaying the message to.  Let’s look at Sony’s decision to create a film of this nature in terms of Rawl’s Veil of Ignorance.  This ethical perspective “asks decision makers to examine the situation objectively from all points of view”, now, it appears that Sony did consider this task, and still made the decision to create and had intentions of showing the film, they just chose to disregard the opinions of those who were against this film being made.  But again, in American culture we uphold the right to speak freely, meaning we present our thoughts and opinion in various mediums free of being restricted by unpopular opinion.

In an Op-Ed piece by Aaron Sorkin in The New York Times he brought forth probably one of the most overlooked realities of the hack on Sony systems in the midst of “The Interview” being released, Sorkin stated, “The Guardians just had to lob the ball; they knew our media would crash the boards and slam it in. First, salaries were published. Not by the hackers, but by American news outlets.” The American public would have known nothing of this hack into Sony systems if the American reporters hadn’t dug up and printed the hacked information themselves onto their news outlets. The ethical component attached to this reality was that these news outlets, decided that damaging information was “newsworthy” and needed to be printing, knowing that they would be the ones providing the information to place other in harm. Clearly ignoring Mills Utility Principle, which is to focus on the outcome; the journalist who decided to run with their new found information did not think about the danger in releasing information such as social security numbers, addresses or other personal information. Our journalist seem to have disregarded most ethical standards and will publish what sells for their paycheck. And what exactly is “newsworthy” about potentially putting individuals lives at risk, tell me more about how this is informative to the masses. We were supposed to be worried about hackers spreading the information around and potentially harming us, but instead we took it into our own hands and shared the information first, because newsworthy in our society seems to have a different meaning then it once had.

“Wouldn’t it be a movie moment if the other studios invoked the NATO rule and denounced the attack on Sony as an attack on all of us, and our bedrock belief in free expression?”, stated Sorkin. It would have been quite the site to see if something like this happened, instead of our journalist running to be active members on the destructive side of the net. When it comes down to the most ethical concerns, it looks like the most attention should be directed to our internal priorities and not so much what others are doing.