I recently re-watched “The Box,” which my wife and I had first seen more than a decade ago. It is a horror movie based on the 1970 short story “Button, Button” by Richard Matheson, one of the writers of the original “Twilight Zone,” and Matheson’s conceit, a mash-up of science fiction and ethics as his work often was, had been turned into an episode of one of the reboots of Rod Serling’s creation.
If I recall, I didn’t make it to the end of the film the first time, because the set-up was so annoying. A strange, disfigured man shows up at a couple’s door with a strange box in his hands. It consists of a red button under a locked glass dome that must be opened with a key. The man explains to the stunned wife (her husband is at work, getting bad news about his job) that they have been chosen to be the recipients of a gift. All they have to do is push the red button, and the man will return to hand over a brief case filled with a million dollars, which will be tax free. However, when the button is pushed, someone, somewhere in the world, will die. He assures the wife that they won’t know the doomed individual. They have only 24 hours to consider the offer, at the conclusion of which the man will return and take the box away to offer to someone else.
It is, obviously, an ethics hypothetical that has been posed in many different ways through the years. What bothered me originally, and worries me now, is that anyone I would care to have in my community would ever push the button. (As you can guess, one of the couple does—“Why not? It’s just a box…” and a chain reaction is launched that causes havoc.)
Ethics Alarms 