Love, sacrifice, and the limits of utilitarianism in Weathering with You

Makoto Shinkai’s 2019 animated film Weathering with You presents a moral dilemma that can be understood through utilitarianism. In the film, the first option is to sacrifice one innocent ‘Sunshine Girl’ to stop Tokyo’s catastrophic rainfall, thus ensuring the happiness and well-being of millions of residents. The alternative is to preserve this ‘Sunshine Girl’s’ life but doom the city to submersion. As existing scholarship largely understands the dilemma presented in the film through the lens of environmental humanities or cultural mythology, instead of its engagement with normative ethics, this paper aims to analyze the film through the perspective of utilitarianism by using immanent critique. This paper argues that Weathering with You is more than a teenage romance but rather presents a moral dilemma and exposes the moral inadequacy of reducing deeply personal bonds to units of utility. The film, however, does not simply repudiate utilitarianism; rather, it can be reinterpreted through a rule-utilitarian lens defending a higher-order rule that prohibits the instrumentalization of individuals.