Smilla's sense of snow is based on Peter Hoeg's best-selling 1993 suspense novel. The literate screenplay by Ann Biderman vividly conveys Smilla's intelligence and idiosyncrasies. Julie Ormond plays a most disagreeable young woman trying to solve a murder in Copenhagen. After a boy in Smilla's building falls to his death from the snow-topped roof, she spots foul play in his footprints. And soon she is unraveling a sinister conspiracy involving a mining company responsible for the death of the boy and his father. Smilla and the mechanic are faced with many moral dilemmas in the film. Through applying Hume's epistemology, Mill's utilitarianism and Wolf's political and moral anarchism we will see if Smilla and the mechanic made the right choice for their moral dilemmas.
Wolf's In Defense of Anarchism argues for what might be called "moral anarchism". Wolf claims that the nature of moral autonomy forbids accepting any authority as binding. His argument is to retain one's moral autonomy; one must always reserve the right to decide for oneself on any moral issue. Wolf believes that you should think for yourself and make your own moral choices. Wolf's thesis is that autonomy and authority are incompatible. "If I am truly autonomous, I cannot accept authority, that would be equal to abandoning my paramount duty of self regulation." Wolf concludes that autonomy means taking commands from only one authoritative source, oneself, and constantly evaluating all attempts to override one's autonomy. Smilla practices wolf defense of anarchism, and shows how incompatible autonomy and authority are.
Smilla makes the choice not to follow the authority of the Copenhagen police by furthering the investigation of Isaiah mysterious death. The concept of authority in Wolf's eyes is that, "Authority is the right to command and correlatively the right to be obeyed. It must be distinguished from power, which is the ability to compel compliance either through threat or the threat of force" Authority is more than power it is the right to be obeyed.
