leahbobet | (no subject)

Okay, so a couple of us are talking about The Box aka "Button, Button" and just how terribly easy it is to break that plot. I mean:

"Hi, push this killing button and I'll give you all this money!"
"No, thanks."
"Moving on, then."

Or, as

tanaise paraphrases the NPR blog on the matter, "It is not a hard decision for me because I AM NOT A HITMAN."

And this makes me wonder whether many specimens of that sort of moral-choice horror story aren't actually about the moral choice, about Would you kill someone? but more, subtextually, about "So...if it was like this and this, would I be allowed to kill someone? How 'bout now?"

When is it okay, socially, for me to just kill someone?*

Because, y'know, sometimes people are just getting so much joy out of the thing.

*This also applies to the "Ethnic drug lords killed my family/kidnapped my blond daughter/etc. and now I must middle-class raaaaaaaage!" genre of film.