Mission Impossible: Falloutis an intensely escapist movie, but it's also a deeply philosophical one. Go see it, right away, for all of the fantastic stunts: one motorcycle chase scene pulls you in so you feel like you are part of the chase (I saw it in 3D, which may have made it especially good). And Tom Cruise did the stunts (really!). But come away fromFalloutthinking, too: should you be the kind of person who saves his friends and risks millions of lives, or the kind of person for whom saving the millions matters to the exclusion of all else? Even before the title rolls, Ethan Hunt faces this choice: whether to save his companions Benji and Luthor, or risk of losing three plutonium cores large enough to make bombs that could kill off millions of people.

One versus many problems are the standard stuff of introductory philosophy courses and psychology experiments about moral attitudes. There are the discussions of the decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, featuring on the one hand utilitarian calculations about how many lives actually were saved, and on the other hand objections to actions in war that harm innocents along with analyses of whether citizens of an aggressor nation are truly ever innocent. There are all those hypotheticals about whether to torture the terrorist in order to get information about the location of a bomb set to go off within a few hours, designed to get students to explore how far they would go in harming an individual and what beneficial ends justify the harm.

还有电车问题。一辆电车沿着轨道疾驰而下，你控制着一个关键的开关，可以改变它的方向。轨道的尽头有4个人(或5个人，或10个人，或多少人)电车会把他们全部撞死，除非你按下开关。但是，如果你按下开关，电车就会沿着另一条轨道疾驰而下，撞死一个人。你应该按下开关吗?

This thought experiment was originally proposed by Philippa Foot in heranalysisof implications of the doctrine of double effect for decisions about abortion. It came to robust fame in a thought experimentdesignedby Judith Jarvis Thompson to test intuitions about whether there are differences between letting die and killing, and what these differences might be. It has multiple iterations, themost (in)famousof which being whether it would make a difference whether you must flip the switch or roll a fat man off a bridge to stop the trolley. This version has generated controversy about how innocents may be treated, what kind of interventions are morally permissible, and whether it evidences fat shaming or disability discrimination.

电车问题也被用于认知科学实验中，当人们被要求解决电车问题时，收集大脑活动的fMRI数据，以及无数其他关于我们如何道德推理的研究。You can play around with trolley problems by participating inthis online test.

ButFalloutasks a different question: should you be the person who simply saves his friends, because that is what he does, or the person who thinks first about the millions, whether for the best or the worst of motives? What kind of a character would you have if you were the one, or the other? What other characteristics might you have? How is being a friends-first kind of person related to virtues such as trustworthiness or loyalty, and what do these relationships tell us about the meaning of trust or loyalty?

These are classic questions of virtue theory.Fallouthelps you to see how they are different from questions about whether to be a consequentialist or a non-consequentialist in moral theory. Ethan Hunt doesn't think about whether he is a consequentialist or a non-consequentialist and what he would do if he were; he just acts in character and deals with the aftermath later. ButFalloutalso challenges you to think about virtue theory itself and what it requires.

Falloutis great suspense: will theMIteam manage to defuse the bomb in time? But it's also great for thinking about virtue theory: what if Hunt fails, bringing not only theMIseries but part of the world to a tragic end?