Hexiong Yang

Makoto Shinkai’s 2019 animated film Weathering with You presents a moral dilemma that can be understood through utilitarianism. In the film, the first option is to sacrifice one innocent ‘Sunshine Girl’ to stop Tokyo’s catastrophic rainfall, thus ensuring the happiness and well-being of millions of residents. The alternative is to preserve this ‘Sunshine Girl’s’ life but doom the city to submersion. As existing scholarship largely understands the dilemma presented in the film through the lens of environmental humanities or cultural mythology, instead of its engagement with normative ethics, this paper aims to analyze the film through the perspective of utilitarianism by using immanent critique. This paper argues that Weathering with You is more than a teenage romance but rather presents a moral dilemma and exposes the moral inadequacy of reducing deeply personal bonds to units of utility. The film, however, does not simply repudiate utilitarianism; rather, it can be reinterpreted through a rule-utilitarian lens defending a higher-order rule that prohibits the instrumentalization of individuals.

In 1991, French philosopher Bruno Latour published his work titled, We Have Never Been Modern, and in 1993 it was translated into English. Latour defined herein the concept of modernity and characterized it by dichotomy. According to Latour, the dichotomic narratives and divisions such as nature versus society, human versus non–human, and scientific versus non–scientific are not actual but rather illusory. By claiming such narratives to be illusory, Latour concludes that humanity as a collective has never achieved modernity. Regardless of whether Latour’s claim is valid or not, it is very meaningful, not only because it is a bold statement, but also because a critical and thorough examination of his claim will yield further intellectual findings, while opening more possibilities for potential questions and investigation. By examining Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, the author argues that the origin of Latour’s project is rooted in his perception of crises, and that such perception leads Latour to a positionality of neutrality.