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PART II Moral Value/Ethical Value

      Introduction

      Moral Value/Ethical Value

      Ted Nannicelli and Mette Hjort

      As Carl Plantinga insightfully notes in his chapter in this section, “When considering the public value of stories on screens, we are typically interested in the ethical implications of the experiences they offer” (p. 113, this volume). This fact is perhaps most apparent when audiences have strong negative reactions to the ethical perspective (or lack thereof) of a screen story—say, for example, in the case of A Serbian Film (2010), The House that Jack Built (2018), or 365 Days (2020). Such films are the most recent instances of motion pictures that spur debate about how the flawed ethical perspective of a motion picture might negatively influence the moral character of its viewers, potentially eroding our shared ethical principles or values. To get a sense of the long history of these kinds of concerns, one need only review the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, which admonished, for example, that “crimes against the law” including theft, robbery, and murder “shall never be presented in such a way as to throw sympathy with the crime as against law and justice or to inspire others with a desire for imitation” (quoted in Doherty 1999, 361).

However, the media attention such films receive should not overshadow the fact that a motion picture’s commendatory ethical perspective is often a reason for praising it, recommending it to friends, family members, students, and so forth. In her chapter in this section, Jane Stadler canvases an increasingly vast literature on motion pictures as a means for moral edification. According to Stadler, “the public value of motion pictures centrally includes the power of storytelling to engage the moral emotions and cultivate empathy” (p. 190, this volume). Stadler offers a sustained analysis of Marjorie Prime (2017) in support of this claim, and Plantinga (p. 118, this volume; 2019a) makes a similar claim for BlackkKlansman (2018). More broadly, Plantinga’s chapter explores “the potential contributions of [screen] stories…to the imaginative ecology of a given culture at a given time,” wherein resides their public value (p. 127, this volume).

      As Ted Nannicelli notes in his chapter, the sort of approach to the ethics of motion pictures taken by Plantinga and Stadler, and much of the scholarship with which they engage, focuses on the fictional content of motion pictures and the ethics of attitude or perspective the film takes on that content and/or the ethics of the response it attempts to solicit from viewers. For example, Plantinga reviews an argument he has made previously, according to which 300 (2006) is an ethically flawed film insofar as it depicts the Persian characters as monstrous Others and “promotes fascist ideology” (p. 122, this volume; 2019b). While Plantinga is surely right that we are typically interested in these sorts of ethical implications, there are a number of other important dimensions of the ethical or moral value of motion pictures.

      Three of the chapters in this section—those by Sanders, Hjort, and Nannicelli—contribute to the development of an ethics of motion picture production. As Hjort and Nannicelli describe in their chapters, interest in the ethics of motion picture production has burgeoned in recent years. Hjort points out that “what is at stake here is how living beings—women, children, animals, and specific professional groups (actresses, stunt persons)—but also, for example, the natural environment are treated during the making of motion pictures” (p. 151, this volume). For this reason, the ethics of film production increasingly attracts the attention of a diverse group of scholars ranging from production studies (e.g., Martin 2012; Mayer 2014) to ecocriticism (e.g. Maxwell and Miller 2012; Vaughan 2019) to philosophy of art (e.g., Nannicelli 2014; Ponech 2014), and with a focus on all sorts of motion picture production from television charity drives (Ong 2016) to traditional, cinematic documentary (Hjort 2018) to interactive, web-based documentary (Sanders, this volume).

      Hjort persuasively argues that, in recent years, the #MeToo movement and the specter of an irreversible climate disaster have brought the topic of production ethics to the fore and, moreover, lent this research a particular urgency. Partly for this reason, ethical breaches or otherwise ethically dubious behavior, tends to be especially visible or, perhaps, what we first notice when exploring the ethics of motion picture production. However, it is important to recognize Hjort’s point that this research program’s “collective aims extend well beyond any mere documentation of unethical behaviour” (p. 151, this volume). On the contrary, other aims include, for example, “developing fairer practices” and “the introduction of regulatory changes” (p. 151, this volume).

To be sure, scholarship on production ethics has a longer history, rooted primarily in the study of documentary film and, in particular, ethnographic film. In the 1970s and 1980s, the emergence of the field of visual anthropology saw scholar-practitioners such as Timothy Asch (1992) and David MacDougall (1998) wrestle with the practical challenges and theoretical questions posed by the ethically fraught nature of ethnographic filmmaking. At the same time, scholarship by Calvin Pryluck (1976) and Larry Gross, John Stuart Katz, and Jay Ruby (1988), addressed similar issues by drawing upon relevant research traditions and methods in film studies, communications, and anthropology. The subtitle of Gross, Katz, and Ruby’s (1988) seminal volume clearly indicates the primary focus of this research program was “the moral rights of subjects in photographs, film, and television.” In her essay in this section, Willemien Sanders picks up two key questions posed by Gross, Katz, and Ruby—the ethics of representation and informed consent. Sanders argues that the recent advances in technology which underpin so-called “interactive documentaries” raise new ethical questions about how subjects are represented and to what they are consenting.

      As a final prefatory remark, we should say something brief about how we and the authors in this section are using the terms “ethical” and “moral”. Roughly speaking, we are using these terms interchangeably to refer to matters relating to the rightness or wrongness of actions and the goodness or badness of dispositions or character traits. The sorts of questions at stake in this domain of inquiry include, for example: How should one act in a given situation? What is the right (or wrong) thing to do? By what principles should one live? And so forth. Some philosophers and theorists regard the moral as a subset of the ethical—more specifically, as a modern, Western conception of the ethical that emphasizes particular ethical concepts like obligation and duty (e.g., Williams [1985] 2011). We have no objections to this account or this usage. But there is another common usage of the term “moral”—as in “moral philosophy”—that is synonymous with “ethical,” and it is this usage that we follow here.

      References