Dr Strangelove: Utilitarianism gone hilariously haywire

     Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb beautifully represents the dangers of Utilitarianism as outlined by Thomas Nagel in his work War and Massacre. In the movie, a psychotic and extremely paranoid airforce general exceeds his authority by taking it upon himself to nuke Russia during the cold war. According to Nagel, nuclear warfare completely defies absolutist restrictions that any decent human ought to have. The restrictions being that it should be considered dirty to attack your opponent's human faculties (ie. through starvation, or chemcal warfare) rather than attacking their faculties as soldiers in which the source of their hostilities lie. This kind of absolutist restriction can keep us from falling into "the abyss of utilitarian apologetics for large-scale murder." This idea is plainly and hilariously through the president explaining to the Russian premier what the situation is. In this scene they are continuously apologizing to one another, the president goes so far as to say "You're sorry?! Well, how do you think I feel!"
  It is incredibly ironic that throughout the movie, the military seems to be oblivious to their utilitarian self-justification. This is demonstrated by the General whenever he explains his self-justification for fighting dirty, is the fact that the "Commies" are the dirtiest fighters, going so far as to manipulate American bodily fluids through fluoridation. The cowboy-hatted pilot of one of the planes even makes a statement about going "toe-to-toe in nuclear warfare with the Ruskis." This is a completely non-coherent idea, since nuclear warfare (a utilitarian idea) is about the farthest you can possibly be from going toe-to-toe (a absolutist idea)." At the same time, however he does briefly mention the internal conflict of the two ideas in each person, saying to his crew: "you wouldn't be human beings if you didn't have strong feelings about nuclear warfare." These intuitive "human" feelings are the essence of Absolutism.