When asked to find something in the media that directly relates to subject matter that had been discussed in our psychology class there were a couple of topics that came to mind. However, one stands out to me in particular, and that is a movie that I have seen recently called John Q. In this film Denzel Washington plays the role of John Q. Archibald, a man who will go to any lengths to keep his one and only son, Michael, from dying. During the movie, John and his wife, Denise, learn that Michael has an enlarged heart and needs an emergency transplant operation. On top of that, John has recently been reduced from full-time to part-time work. He can't afford the operation and his health insurance won't cover it, so he vows to do whatever it will take to keep his son alive. This obviously becomes an extremely difficult moral decision that Archibald must make.
John Hay Residence
John_Deere_4630_Tractor.jpg
Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral developmentIn the psychology textbook, there is very similar example to what occurred in the movie John Q, this example was used by a psychologist by the name of Kohlberg to conduct a moral reasoning experiment. The situation in the text tells of a woman that is near death with a special type of cancer, and there is only one, recently developed drug that could possibly save her. However, the druggist was apparently charging 10 times what it cost to make the drug, which is 2000 dollars. The woman's husband tried to get all the money he could however came up short, and the druggist refused to cut him a deal, and therefore, leaving the man two choices, to either let his wife die, or steal the medicine. And like any good husband the man broke into the store and stole the drug for his...