Lord
of War (2005) is a film in which a Ukrainian-born American arms dealer,
Yuri Orlov, and his brother, Vitaly, who works with Yuri when not in voluntary rehab
for drug abuse, make money by selling military arms to dictators including
Andre Baptiste of Liberia. Whereas Yuri is able to maintain a mental wall
keeping him from coming to terms with his contribution to innocent people
getting killed by the autocrats who are his customers, Vitality is finally
unable to resist facing his own complicity, and that of his brother. This
itself illustrates that moral concerns may have some influence on some people
but not others. Yuri’s position, which can be summed up as, what they do
with the guns that we sell them is none of our business, contrasts
with Vitaly as he realizes that as soon as the Somalian warlord takes the guns
off the trucks, villages down the hill will be killed. Vitaly even sees a woman
and her young child being hacked to death down below. Yuri tries to manage his
brother so the sale can be completed and the two brothers can get out of Somalia,
but Vitaly has finally had enough and has come to the conclusion that he and
Yuri have been morally culpable by selling guns to even sadistic dictators like
Andre Baptiste. Even as Yuri ignores his own conscience, Vitaly finally cannot
ignore the dictates of his own, and he takes action. Does he ignore his
happiness, and thus his self-interest, in being willing to die to save the
villagers by blowing up (admittedly only) one of the two trucks, or has he
reasoned through his conscience and found that it coincides with his happiness?
In other words, are the moral dictates of a person’s conscience necessarily in
line with a person’s happiness, and thus one’s self-interest? This is a
question that the filmmaker could have explored in the film.
The full essay is at "Lord of War."
