Hollywood Whiteknighting?
An anonymous reader writes with a tricky “ethical dimension” inspired by the movie It Ends With Us:
Hello there Hades. I wanted to reach out about a movie I saw this weekend its called It Ends With Us released 2024 by Columbia Pictures and Wayfarer Studios. This was a really tough movie about domestic abuse and it makes you ask a lot of hard questions about where abuse comes from and how you can recognize the signs of it. Because sometimes abuse is very obvious but othertimes it is hard to tell just because she has a bruised eye doesnt mean it wasnt an accident. By the way sorry if there are any spoilers in this email. I dont know if you have a no spoilers rule.
Anyway I wanted to reach out about the movie to ask about an ethical dimension that came up for my while I watched the movie and reminded me of your blog which I like to read. You see I am very interested in ethics always have been especially since I started reading about it on social media specifically the website Tumblr. One of the most important scenes in the movie and again spoiler alert is when the ex boyfriend character called Atlas notices that the main character Lily has a black eye at his restaurant. He is worried that its because she is being abused by her new boyfriend but when he asks her about it she says no it was an accident dont worry. Now one of the important things I learned about on Tumblr is this believe women. But this time it was an accident but in the movie it turned out that the new boyfriend actually was hurting her and if Atlas believed her that would be bad in the end.
So my question is this in the end does believe women really matter if the abuser is going to make Lily not even believe herself and even lie about it when Atlas asks her if the abuse was real or not.
Thank you for your quesion, anon. We dispatched an HEC to investigate some of your primary source material in depth to ensure the highest possible quality “A” in responding to your ethics “Q.” Hence: we apologize for our delay in getting back to you! But enough with the chuff.
Here’s what we figured out: Tumblr says “believe women,” but it’s a little more complicated than that. You also need to remember an important ethical principle from Reddit which says that “whiteknighting is bad.” Whiteknighting is a Reddit term for when a man tries to do a nice thing, but he has an ulterior motive.
In the movie, Atlas’s behavior is classic whiteknighting—his ulterior motive is that he has empathy for Lily and cares about her—and according to Reddit, this means he is in the wrong. But now we recall a second Tumblr rule which is that Reddit is bad. This rule is actually more powerful than the one about believing women. So we can conclude that Atlas was in the right after all to approach Lily and intervene in the abusive situation.
Hope that makes sense!
Don’t forget to reach out this holiday season at hades@acaciavalleyhoa.org with your ethics questions for our team of seasoned ethics consultants. Let us be your reason this season!