Ethical dilemmas in Glengarry Glen Ross and Sicko

¶ … Confluence of Ethical Films

The film Glengarry Glen Ross depicts the futility of the life of real estate salesmen, particularly those who are tasked with selling to people who are not inclined or lack the ability to make purchases. The film showcases a variety of unethical behaviors as it chronicles four salesmen's desperate attempts to succeed in their profession, with the knowledge that the two who are the least successful in two days will lose their jobs. The manager of this particular sales company has a series of 'good leads' hidden in his office, which the salesmen attempt to procure via bribery, threats, and theft. The salesman who steals the leads is caught.

The ethical issues in this film are two-fold -- they involve transgressions on the part of the salesmen and various aspects of their lives that force them to make those transgressions. All of the salesmen are operating under the pressure of losing their jobs if they do not have immediate success, which is indicative of the unethical expectations of their company's management. The salesman played by Jack Lemmon faces an ethical dilemma in that he has a family member in the hospital and is attempting to pay for her treatment with his family sales career. In order to attain the leads that can help him do so, this character commits theft. Other salesmen lie to customers to get them to buy.

These ethical issues particularly relate to the notion of trade secrets discussed in Lecture 4 (McClean, N.D., p. 1). A good deal of the unethical behavior displayed in this movie is actuated so that the salesmen can get trade secrets in the form of the most promising sales leads. However, the manager of the company is willing to give them unreasonable deadlines to accomplish sales without this pivotal information, which is "proprietary to the business" (McClean, N.D., p. 1).

Sicko is a non-fiction documentary about the disparities in health care treatment around the world. The film focuses on the health care industry in the U.S., where millions of people cannot afford insurance and many others who do have insurance are denied care as ways to financially benefit this industry. These domestic realities are contrasted with international ones in countries such as England, Wales, Northern Ireland, France, and Cuba, in which residents receive free and low cost care. The documentarian, Michael Moore, goes to numerous facilities before rounding up a herd of volunteers in the wake of 9/11 that the government will not provide health care for.

The salient ethical issues discussed in this film include the monetization of services and products (pertaining to healthcare) that people need to survive on the part of a conglomerate of domestic forces including the government, politicians, and private industry. These entities deny care to those who have health insurance to maximize profits, despite the fact that doing so harms people who are spending money in the health care industry. Additionally, numerous people cannot afford healthcare because of the industrialization of services that are free in other nations.

The connection of these ethical issues to the lectures and readings for this unit are clear when one considers the notion of conflicts of interests in Lecture 4 (McClean, N.D., p. 4). Specifically, it is a conflict of interest for the U.S. to have laborers from some of its most reputed public service departments (such as the fire and police departments) volunteer their efforts to assist with the World Trade Center attacks, yet fail to provide those same people with health care difficulties this incurred while laboring for this country. This is a basic conflict of interest between "employers and employees" (McClean, N.D., p. 4). That conflict of interest is underpinned when one considers that their are federal forces and lobbyists reinforcing the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry, while those who have contributed significantly to the government cannot obtain healthcare and pharmaceutical benefits.

Capitalism: A Love Story is a documentary about some of the history and more notable ramifications of capitalism, primarily as they are manifest in the U.S. It begins with footage of former U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt championing the average rights that most Americans are not able to access under the current legislation. The rest of the film is dedicated to illustrating those highlights, such as the fact that employers can take out life insurance policies on employees which are paid to the former, and not the struggling family of the latter. It draws parallels between the real estate bust, financial woes and health care drivers for the economic climate at the end of the last decade.