Boiler Room Ethics Essay Example
Boiler Room Ethics Essay Example

Boiler Room Ethics Essay Example

Available Only on StudyHippo
Topics:
  • Pages: 3 (707 words)
  • Published: April 9, 2017
  • Type: Essay
View Entire Sample
Text preview

In business today, there are opportunists that will attempt to take advantage of a situation for personal and monetary gain. The movie”Boiler Room” is one such example of these opportunists taking advantage of others. The movie focuses around the main character, Seth Davis, a young man who has made thousands of dollars running an underground casino out of his house. His father, who is a federal judge, finds out about the casino and tells him to close down the casino and search for a real job.

Seth wants to regain respect and approval from his father, and gets introduced to a stockbroker company J. T. Marlin as two brokers came to his casino and were able to convince him to join their firm JT Marlin. Seth not understanding what goes on behind the scenes of the stock market joins the firm, in

...

the hope of making an easy buck. The newly hired trainees make calls to lists of prominent to middle class men and apply high-pressure tactics to sell the company’s exclusive initial public offerings (IPO’s).

Seth becomes one of the firm’s best trainees and is exceptional at sales. He quickly rises through the firm and begins to notice practices that he begins to question, and eventually learns the truth behind the firm.His curiosity leads Seth to discover that the firm isn’t what he thought it was and is faced with several ethical dilemmas. He realizes J. T. Marlin is a boiler room that sells non-profitable stocks.

He starts to realize that all these times he is forcing customers to buy something that they don’t want or cannot afford. Seth begins to struggle with his conscience as

View entire sample
Join StudyHippo to see entire essay

the storyline progress, beginning to feel remorse towards one man whom he convinced to invest his entire savings into a phony stock.At the time, Seth knew that he was getting the man to invest in a stock that did not exist, and that illustrated some of the most unethical attitudes and actions during this film. It is not until after he is arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, that Seth decides to help, and shut down the brokerage firm. This illustrates his ethics and moral were affected by what was going on around him, and he realized, after being arrested, that what he was doing was wrong, and needed to do something to fix it.

By going to the brokerage manager, and getting the man who had lost everything 10,000 shares of stock n another phony company, he was illustrating the “hero” mentality, trying to correct his moral and ethical injustices by giving back the money to one of his clients. At the end of the movie, when his father finally agrees to help bail Seth out, he gets caught up in the investigation, and his position as a Federal Judge is jeopardized. This is when Seth becomes the “hero” of the story, as he refuses to cooperate with the FBI unless they keep his dad out of all investigations. This illustrates Seth’s maturing morality. If I was in the position of any of these characters, I would like to think that I would have acted differently.

It is easy to point a finger or identify the problems surrounding these characters, but it’s another thing to claim that one would handle things differently. Assuming that I

would have done the morally right, I would have probably quit after I began to find out more and more information about their unethical and immoral practices. Movies such as Boiler Room, have underlying themes that if watched objectively, can not only be entertaining, but can also be a means of informing us of how various actions can affect business and society.This movie relates to businesses today as there are people just like the ones who were portrayed in this film. There are groups of people who exist in business and society who are driven by personal gain, and will walk over anyone who happens to get in their way.

This unfortunately will continue to happen as business will always have greed and stupidity. As long as these two attitudes exist, there will always be opportunists who will be there to take advantage.

Get an explanation on any task
Get unstuck with the help of our AI assistant in seconds
New