Ethical issues brought up in the movie, “ Thank You for Smoking” : When Nick Naylor appears on the talk show along side with the cancer patient and he basically turns the situation around so that the tabocco industry isn’t to blame for the young boy being diagonosed with cancer from smoking, and in fact by people dying from using their product the industry wouldn’t be making any profit.
The “mod squad”, which stands for merchants of death, in the movie, all the people who are a part of this group are well aware that the products that they sell and promote are generally appealing to the younger generation that contributes to hundreds and thousands of deaths a year, yet they continue to defend them. In one scene Naylor is helping his son do homework, he teaches his son about how to argue something he is writing about. Naylor says ,” that’s the beauty of arguement, because if you argue correctly you’re never wrong”.
This is teaching his son that no matter what he side he decides to be on, if he keeps on argueing and finds some usable facts to support his arguement he will always be right. Naylor doesn’t address the issues head on necessarily, in fact the way he approaches how to argue that tobacco is poison and that you shouldn’t smoke it etc, is he simply just goes with his theory of every individuals has the right to choose what they what to do, or listen too.
When a member of the mod squad is visiting Nick in the hospital after he nearly died of a nicotine over dose, he places a gun on the table right in front of Joey, Nick’s son. Immediatly Joey is intrigued with the weapon, then retracts his actions and says, “ gunsshould be treated with respect”. The other member swats his hand away, and is clearly annoyed by his behaviour which then makes me think of them as hypocrits. The captain sends a briefcase full of money to Naylor’s hotel when he is in California and tell’s him that he must visit “Marlboro Man”, Lorne Lutchwho has been diagnosed with Cancer.
Naylor is to try and bribe Lutch into accepting the money in exchange for silence, and to retract all his previous comments towards the tobacco industry. In this scene Naylor is very good at convincing the Marlboro Man into taking the money, simply because he uses his best tactics of negotiation to lure him into thinking that by taking the money he might feel better about himself in the sense that now he has money to perhaps be able to pay medical bills to help him prolong his life. Give him the right reatment and he might just fight the cancer. Social Responsibility in Thank You for Smoking I think that the part when Senator Finistirre is doing his speech about putting the poison logo on every cigarette package is an example of social responsibility. Because as the Senator of Vermont, he is standing up against the tobacco industry and educating the younger generation as well as the older, of how harmful it is. Society as a whole will eventually embrace this campaign and learn how to educate others of tobacco use.
In 1952, Readers digest slammed the tobacco industry by stating that it had some health risks associated with smoking. This then lead to the invention of “filters” in cigarette’s and thus resulted in more people buying the product. This is an example of social responsibility because when there were public outcry’s of how unhealthy it was smoking the cigarette’s (back in the 50’s) the tobacco industry improvised and came out with a solution to diminish the amount of chemicals being inhaled.
Speaking to the press, Naylor swears he will clear the names of those mentioned in the Heather Holloway’s recent article, where she bashes Naylor as well as the Mod squad. (? ) Ethics and Social Responsibility – Tana In the movie Thank You for Smoking, there are quite a few examples where you will find how ethics and social responsibility is exercised, and not always in a positive way. The main character Nick Naylor, is a lobbyist who works for a Tobacco Company. Naylor is a smooth talker who slyly turns the words around in a conversation and turns it on the people who are against him.