The poem is Thea Lee.

Add by Homer on the film is Troy, starring Brad Pitt on Made a few years ago.

They're closely connected on very largely, though not completely.

The film is based on the poem.

The film contains stuff, particularly towards the end, that the poem doesn't contain because the prime really never comes to a conclusion.

And in the film they have the sack of Troy on Dhe.

The Death of Achilles.

That's not in the poem at all.

What's interesting philosophically about the relation between these two things is that they illustrate rather dramatically, a problem that philosophers have been very interested in recently.

They have a name for this problem, and they call it the problem of imaginative resistance.

Perhaps our very briefly explain what that problem is, we can imagine all sorts of things on most of the time, we have no problem imagining things that we don't believe in.

We are very happy with ghost stories.

You don't have to believe in ghosts to enjoy a ghost story.

We like science fiction.

We're happy with stories in which people will fly out of the window.

There doesn't seem to be any sense in which we can't imagine these things.

I see.

But when it comes to issues like morality, things seem to be a bit different, so I can imagine a world where people engage in murderous activities.

They sacks.

It is they rape women.

They murder Children.

I can imagine all that happening, but I can't.

At least I can't easily imagine it being right.

But what the world of Homer asks us to do is to imagine not just that these people are doing these things, but that in some sense they are the right things to do.

The easiest way into the poem, I think, is through the idea of Helen of Troy, because I think most people will have heard of Helen of Troy.

Helen falls in love with Paris, who's a prince of Troy.

They run off to Troy together.

This causes the Greeks to arrive at the shores on DTA, want Helen back Onda, also for various other complicated reasons.

They attack Troy and in the in the end they destroy the city.

It's a poem off 15,000 lines.

It's very, very long indeed, It's very heavy on detail, particularly the detail of battles on Dhe, particularly the detail off the agonizing deaths of many of the people in the battles in To that extent, it's rather similar to the film is that no one else?

There are a number of places in the film where characters behave in a very obviously modern way.

This is particularly true with the central character Achilles, who's played by Brad Pitt.

It was clear, I guess, to the filmmakers that they had to make Brad Pitt a character, that an audience was going to empathize with, a film in which he plays the central character.

But nobody can empathize with him is a film that's bound to fail, so they simply couldn't have that character do the sorts of things and thinking the sorts of ways that the character in the Iliad thinks and does a one point in the film Achilles, his great friend Potro Close, is killed in the poem.

A response to this from Achilles is to take a dozen Trojan Children, cut their throats and throw them on the funeral pyre.

This is presented as something which is a little excessive, perhaps, but understandable in a hero.

Obviously, the filmmakers were not goingto have Brad Pitt do anything like that.

The other notable difference, I think, is the in attitudes towards women.

There doesn't seem to be any sense in Homer that there's anything wrong with taking women as slaves, essentially a sex slaves.

So the whole relationship between Achilles on the woman he abducts is unrecognizable in the film from what it is in the poem.

I think there's, Ah, a couple of aspects to this, one of which is fairly easy to understand.

That's empathy.

I think it's pretty clear that we don't can't empathize with people who we think of us behaving in very bad ways.

I think the other problem that's a bit harder to understand is that when I called the problem of imaginative resistance, why is it that we can't think our way into alien Morant moralities in the way that we can think our way into alien social systems or into alien physical worlds?

We just seem tohave some kind of block when it comes to thinking of things which are actually in moral as being morally right.

People have come up with one or two suggestions about why it might be that we have that problem.

One of them is to say, essentially, well, alien morality is a really incoherent.

They just in the end don't actually make any sense.

So it's not surprising that we can't imagine them.

The problem with that view is that a lot of stuff which is incoherent and doesn't in the end really make much sense is stuff that we can imagine.

So, for instance, people are happy with science fiction stories in which time travel takes place.

Somebody may go back to a time before he was born and become his own grandfather.

Now, in the end, I think that's an incoherent idea.

But on the whole, people are happy to be able to imagine that sort of thing.

So I think the incoherence objection, the incoherence answer doesn't really work.

So another solution to the problem is to say that we find in these sorts of stories an insidious suggestion that we should take the morality of this story to be the rial morality of the world, and we resistant to that so and that does certainly happen.

So if you watch these days, old Nazi war propaganda films in which Jewish people are represented as being a conspiratorial on dhe, a threat to the state.

These air certainly fictions, but they're fictions that we don't want to have anything to do with, because we worry that there's an invitation behind this, that we should actually believe that the real world is like that.

And that's very common infection.

The name for it is export.

We have a fictional story, but there's an implicit suggestion that we should export something from the story into our real world beliefs.

So you may very well worry that the explanation have just given doesn't really account for the fact that we are happy to imagine all sorts of physical things happening, which we wouldn't believe in his on answer to that question.

I don't know whether in the end, it's a really good answer, The answer says.

There's a basic difference between moral thinking on dhe thinking about the physical world when it comes to the basic facts about the physical world.

There's very widespread agreement about what they are, so we don't often encounter people who want to persuade us that the physical world is radically different from the way that we think it is when it comes to morality things a rather different.

We're always arguing with each other about what's morally right.

There isn't a sort of uncontested moral core to our thinking, given that we might reasonably be quite sensitive to the idea that somebody wants to subtly persuade us of their morality, which is different from ours, whereas we're simply not sensitive to that in the physical domain.

My suspicion is that our tendency to be resistant in it in relation to morality maybe one of our defenses against being undermined morally by a temptation So we are often tempted toe act in ways of the immoral on Dhe.

I guess we're tempted to tell ourselves stories that make those things seem like the moral thing to do.

It.

Maybe, and this is a guess.

It may be a good thing that we're somewhat resistant to that you might very well ask why we don't doom or serious empirical inquiry.

And that's something that does worry philosophers, thes days.

We sit in our armchairs and pontificate about the reasons why people made the film in this way rather than in that way.

Why don't we go out and actually ask them.

I think they're a couple of reasons why we might not want to do that.

One is, well, basically, we're not very good at that sort of thing.

We want to leave that to other people, but I think there is another reason which is, well, I'm not sure you'd get very informative or in necessarily very honest answers from people about those sorts of things.

In fact, it may very well be the case that people who make those sorts of decisions don't themselves have a terribly clear idea about why they made them.

They may give you answers to those questions.

People often do give us answers to questions about the motives, but we often have a sense that they're confabulation, and that may be the case here.