Mendacity, Rule Consequentialist Ethics and The Ploughman's Lunch

Abstract

This article examines Ian McEwan's script for director Richard Eyre's film, The Ploughman's Lunch (1983), the title of which alludes to a deceptive, post-World War II advertising campaign that promulgated a false narrative about British tradition. McEwan's script, and Eyre's film adaptation of it, offer a prescient exposé of Britain's culture of mendacity in the 1980s in ways that draw on rule-consequentialist ethics to maintain that lying on the personal, professional, and political level has a pernicious effect on society. McEwan's work on the film also marks a crucial turning point in the author's career, one in which he first begins to explore complex ethical and moral conundrums that would figure prominently in his major fiction.