What political movement is Donald Trump heading? After we’ve seen him a hundred days governing, the answer is still unclear. Many call Trump a populist. But there’s no sign of the wall, the immigration ban seems dead for now, China is not called a currency manipulator, Hillary Clinton is not in prison, and it seems NAFTA is here to stay. Neither, it seems, is economic populism on the menu.
There’s a repeating social experience I’ve made. It happens during conversation with non-philosophers—say, at a dinner, especially at the Oxford formal dinner table. I explain that I am (or rather, was) doing philosophy—political philosophy even, which to many sounds interesting enough. Conversation then often drifts on to some broadly political topic. But surprisingly often, the conversation takes a turn to debating moral relativism. I’ve had it dozens of times, enough to extrapolate the generic form this conversation takes. (To a lesser degree, it’s a conversation that I’ve had with new undergraduates and undergraduate interviewees.)
(This review spoilers both the 1995 and 2017 films.)
Ghost in the Shell comes in several instantiations—the original manga, two movies, two anime series, and now the Hollywood movie. The outstandingly best of these is the first movie, also named Ghost in the Shell (1995). The 1995 movie follows an elite Japanese security unit, Section 9, that tracks a mysterious hacker, the Puppetmaster. After a series of dead ends—witnesses who have been “ghost-hacked”, their cyber-brains stripped of their memories and identity—the Puppetmaster presents himself to Section 9 in a cyborg body, claiming to be a computer program that has gained consciousness—a “ghost” in the series’ terminology—on the net, and asks for asylum. The Puppetmaster’s body is whisked away by a competing government agency, Section 6.