Teaching Ethics in Organ Transplantation: Cases and Movies

Part C: Movies as teaching material – ethical issues in organ transplantation

Part C: Movies as teaching material – ethical issues in organ transplantation Sabine Wöhlke, Silke Schicktanz Movies can be a wonderful starting point to teach the ethics of organ transplantation. They usually rely on a kind of moral knowledge. Teachers can use these popular narratives for bioethical reflection: they provide useful, compelling, and even “cool” case studies for bioethical issues and give fleshed-out interpretations of bioethical claims. Films provide compelling illustrations for philosophical ideas. We suggest using cinema for its pedagogical value. If the alleged cinematicphilosophical insight can be paraphrased in a linguistic form, and thus communicated discursively, then the film no longer serves as an exclusive (visual) vehicle for such knowledge (see Livingston 2006). Films can provide vivid and emotionally engaging illustrations of bioethical issues, and when sufficient background knowledge is in place, reflections about films can contribute to the exploration of specific theses and arguments. Most of the films treated in this volume are a pleasure to watch and are intellectually stimulating. By grounding bioethical discussions and arguments in a film, students will gain a sense of the excitement and fascination of philosophical bioethics and will use their minds and hearts to better comprehend the key issues, methods, and arguments used in this field to reason through these issues. A more ambitious claim for the value of film for philosophy is to see some films as not merely illustrating independently given philosophical ideas but also as offering an interpretation and advanced understanding of these. Instead, literature and movies could be seen as thought experiments in which technological and medical developments are interpreted, elaborated and critically discussed in their consequences for individuals, society, and body-mind conceptions. We have chosen nine examples of internationally known movies, that in their story-line explicitly refer to organ transplantation (see table Movies as Teaching Material 68 on the following pages): John Q.; Heartless; COMA; 21 Grams; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Todo sobre mi madre/All about my mother; The Island; Flow and the Educational Outreach Kit; Shichinin no tomurai /The Innocent Seven. The general topics of all these films are manifold and vary from identity problems, brain death, body conceptions , guilt, indebtedness, cloning, tissue donation and many more. We analyzed these films by developing a list of questions which could be used by instructors for stimulating a discussion on ethics in class. We suggest that teachers select single scenes for discussing particular problems . The discussion of movies could start with the ethical dimension but could be extended to a broader perspective of how a movie is biased with respect to different ethical perspectives, how visual and audio effects stress or undermine emotions, arguments, and perspectives. However, this list of provided questions is seen as a starting point and a didactical help for teachers. Of course, it could and should be enlarged and individually adapted to different settings. Finally, it is the responsibility of each teacher to ensure that the use of movies for teaching is in line with national and international copy rights. ...