Saturday, October 31, 2015

What are at least a dozen potential moral, ethical, clinical, and legal issues in the movie Good Will Hunting?

The movie Good Will Hunting is rife with dilemmas from a variety of fields. Some of them include:
Whether Prof. Lambeau is "using" Will Hunting. After discovering Will's talents, Lambeau uses his connections in academia to give Will the opportunity to develop his abilities in math, in exchange for Will seeing a psychologist. While both of these actions are admirable, as the movie progresses, Lambeau increasingly seems more interested in utilizing Will to advance his own interests and enhance his personal reputation.
Sean's relationship with Will. While Sean's interests in helping Will seem genuine, psychologists are not supposed to develop personal friendships with their patients. Whether Sean has done this is foggy.
Will's decision to abandon what seems to be a potentially lucrative and productive career in order to pursue Skylar. Morally speaking, is his decision the right one, or does he have a duty to use his skills in a way that benefit people?
An interesting legal issue comes up when Will sends Chuckie to "negotiate" during a job interview that Prof. Lambeau set up for Will. During the interview, Chuckie seems to embrace the fact that the interviewers think he is Will and demands a "retainer" to keep the communication going. Does this misrepresentation attach to Will, as well?
It is unclear whether Skylar uses her relationship with Will to plagiarize while at Harvard. While she insists that she "needs to know these things" during the scene at the outdoor coffee shop where Will says he "sees things" like classical composers saw the piano, she also goes out with Will after he does her homework for her.
Another moral issue is agency. Will might be an adult (he was tried as an adult for hitting a police officer), but it's clear he's not making important decisions in his own life—Prof. Lambeau and Sean are. Are these two characters doing it right, or should they take a more hands-off approach, as Sean advocates?
When Will lies to Skylar about his "family," is he protecting himself or is he trying to avoid becoming attached and deliberately destroying his relationship? Or both? 
Regarding the initial math problem that Prof. Lambeau posts: should Will have even tried solving it? It wasn't there for him, it was there for the students of Lambeau's class. If one of them complains that they didn't get a chance to solve the problem, do they have any rights?
Does Sean violate his status as Will's therapist by sharing personal and intimate details from his own life?
Prof. Lambeau pulls strings to help Will avoid jail time for assaulting a police officer. Is this morally right? Will was convicted and is being punished, but Prof. Lambeau intervenes.
In one of the most important scenes in the movie, Will tells his best friend, Chuckie, that he just wants to settle down, drink beers, and grow old in Boston. Chuckie says that if Will does that, Chuckie would kill him because Will has a gift that no one else there has, and if he squandered that gift, it would be a huge disappointment. Is Chuckie right for pushing Will to use what he has? Does Will have the right to not use it if he wants to?
Will chooses to educate himself and tells a Harvard student that he knows just as much as he does for the price of some overdue books. The student responds that at least he'll have a degree, raising the important moral issue of how to practically measure someone's intellectual merit.

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