Cobb Is To Blame For Mal's Deception

During the majority of the movie Cobb and his team spend time in somebody else’s subconscious without that person’s knowledge. The reason they are there is because they are hired to implant an idea into Fischer’s mind. To be precise they drug Robert Fischer, attach themselves and him to a machine that will allow them to share a dream and repeat this until they have reached a third dream level in order to plant an idea in Fischer’s subconscious that will cause him to break up his father’s business empire. This idea will remain firmly lodged in Fischer’s brain, without him knowing that it is not his own idea. This raises the important question about the ethics of idea-giving and consent thereof. Furthermore I will investigate whether, and to what extent, Cobb can be blamed for Mal’s death.
The most common form of idea-giving is teaching. It happens daily in a variety of situations ranging from school to home life, leisure time activities and much more. Being taught new information is necessary in order to learn and evolve. The main difference is that when someone teaches us something we know that that information, or idea, is coming from that person. For example when a friend tells us not to think about pink elephants that is exactly the image we see in our minds. However, contrarily to inception, we know that is not our own idea. As Daniel P. Malloy puts it: “The act of inception is about the ideas that you didn’t
know you were going to get and, indeed, may not even have known you’ve gotten.” (128) This raises the question if there is any kind of idea-giving that is morally right. According to postmodernist epistemologies, some even go as far as viewing all forms of idea-giving and teaching as immoral. These education philosophers argue that what is taught, or the ideas that are passed on, are selected according to a subjective preference of specific society or individual. (Barkman) This would mean that even if Cobb taught his children facts such as one plus one equals two, or that Japan is an island, it would be considered indoctrination. The reason this view is not wide spread, is that it contradicts itself, because teaching that everything that we taught is a subjective opinion is a subjective opinion. Therefore, it can be concluded that teaching is, in general, not immoral.
The reason why inception is considered immoral is the lack of consent.
Fischer does not know he will be drugged. He does not know that the men who drugged him will enter his mind. And most importantly, he is unaware that he will be given an idea that will define him for the rest of his life. One can argue that Fischer “gave himself the idea”, but under normal conditions he would never have had that idea. Instead, Cobb and his team created an artificial environment which would ensure that the seed of the idea that they planted in Fisher’s mind would
grow.