Fringe: What Lies Below Fringe

Fringe: What Lies Below

Fringe is about an FBI team that joins forces with a scientist (once institutionalized) and his son to crack cases that are considered "fringe" cases because they lie outside of what is considered the norm. However, what the team finds out is that these cases all seem to be linked together somehow and they look to a large corporation -- Massive Dynamics -- as possibly being at the center of it all. In the episode entitled "What Lies Below," a deadly virus has been broken out in an office building where Olivia and Peter are trapped with others inside. Peter's father, Dr. Bishop, is able to get the building quarantined, but Peter becomes infected inside the building.

The virus is a smart virus. It wants to get people outside so that it can propagate and infect more people, eventually killing everyone. Thus the government has the idea of killing the 12 people inside the building so that it can't spread. From a utilitarian perspective, this would not be a bad plan; in fact, it would be a good plan because it would ensure happiness and survival for a greater number of people. The whole argument looked at in this utilitarian perspective is incredibly persuasive: 12 people vs. The world. In terms of utilitarianism, this would be the better outcome because fewer people would die and this would thus be for the greater good of mankind. Utilitarianism aims to help the most people possible and this would help the most people (i.e. The greatest number).

Kantianism would say that the act is more important than the outcome of the act. That is to say that the people inside the building may be infected, but they are still people and thus they do not deserved to be killed. Kant did not want people to be treated as if they were a means to an end, but rather, people are the end. Going inside the building and killing everyone out of fear is using people as a means to an end (to save the entire world). There are moral requirements, according to Kant, and Kant's Categorical Imperative is what determines those moral requirements. Kant believed that there is a right and there is a wrong. There are no shades of gray and there aren't times when something is right and something is wrong. Something that is right is always right and vice versa for wrong. That means that killing people is always wrong, no matter what the situation is. The people in the office building may be infected with a virus that can wipe out all of mankind, but that still doesn't make it right for a person to kill another person. Kant believed that people must act in accordance to the maxim that they wish would become a universal law. So that means that if I think it is okay to go in and kill these people, then I must believe that this should be a universal law.

For Mill and Bentham, there is a right and wrong. Depending on the situation, right and wrong can change. Sometimes killing may be okay and sometimes it might not be. Utilitarian believers would not think it is right for someone to kill a person just because the person was an abusive husband, but they would most likely believe it would be okay to kill 12 people if the outcome meant that a greater number of people thrived because of the act. Senseless killing would have no benefit to others and it could never be argued so. Utilitarians don't see people as being expendable, much like Kantians, but they do see the goodness that can come out of a situation like the one presented in Fringe.