Acknowledgments
As always, my first note of thanks goes to Sophia Harris, whose love and support are threaded through this entire work. Thank you to Norm Hirschy and the staff at Oxford University Press for their help in realizing this project. I also offer a particular note of thanks to Jane Stadler for her guidance over the years. Thanks to all of my friends and colleagues at the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image, many of whom offered various types of input into this book, often during passionate discussions at the bar following conference sessions. My gratitude also to colleagues at both the University of Sydney and the University of Nottingham Ningbo China whom I have enjoyed working closely alongside, discussing ideas with, and reciprocally assisting in times of need. Thank you to everyone who read and commented on portions of this work or offered their support. Thank you to Kim Wilkins, Mary Jane Ainslie, Ann Deslandes, Celia Lam, Filippo Gilardi, Andrew White, Gary Rawnsley, May Tan-Mullins, Yan Luo, David Kelly, Rebecca Johinke, Bruce Isaacs, Peter Marks, Aaron Taylor, Carl Plantinga, Henry Bacon, Dirk Eitzen, Alix Beeston, and Celia Harris. My gratitude also for the helpful feedback from anonymous reviewers.
Chapters in this volume contain material previously published in Wyatt MossWellington, “Affecting Profundity: Cognitive and Moral Dissonance in Lynch, Loach, Linklater and Sayles,” Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 11, no. 1 (2017); Wyatt Moss-Wellington, “The Emotional Politics of Limerence in Romantic Comedy Films,” NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies 8, no. 1 (2019); and Wyatt Moss-Wellington, “Benign Violations in the Suburban Ensemble Dramedy,” Comedy Studies 12, no. 1 (2020); all reprinted by permission. Thank you to the editors, readers, and reviewers of these earlier works for their invaluable advice.
Thank you, finally, to all my friends and family for being such wonderful people. My love to you all.
Introduction
Cognitive film and media theories have traditionally pursued descriptive rather than prescriptive goals: they tell us what our responses to screen media are rather than what they could be. Ethicists working in the cognitive tradition, such as Carl Plantinga, Murray Smith, Margrethe Bruun Vaage, and Noël Carroll, and phenomenologist-compatibilists, such as Jane Stadler and Robert Sinnerbrink, have effectively described how emotional responses to media’s provocations inform moral judgment.1 That is, cognitive media ethics has been, until now, a metaethical and descriptive rather than a normative enterprise, where metaethics addresses the various means of answering ought questions, and normativity more directly addresses how we ought to behave. This body of literature offers reasonable explanations of moral responsiveness to screen characters with an eye to psychological and evolutionary perspectives on moral judgment. However, it is not always clear how this information might help us answer deliberative ethical questions arising from such media: how do the cognitive sciences help us evaluate rather than describe the moral content of a story or appraise rather than survey the ethical issues facing current film and media practice and industry? This book extends current groundwork in cognitive media studies to these more normative goals, and in so doing establishes an applied approach to cognitivist media ethics and its associated hermeneutics. Throughout this volume, I introduce methods by which current developments in the social sciences can be applied to our assessments of media and storytelling arts, including the moral elements of media production and reception. Ultimately, this book reveals how cognitive media studies can help refine our necessary ethical evaluations of films, screen media, news media, social media, and the culture that develops around them. It makes the case that normative ethics can be a scholarly rigor rather than the individualized, doctrinaire moralism the term “normative” might evoke.
The key problem with which I begin is that nature cannot tell us how to act, and nor can descriptions of natural phenomena. The more our scientific inquiries uncover about the mysteries of the universe we mutually inhabit, the richer
1 For Stadler, the affective turn unites both cognitive and phenomenological film theory. Jane Stadler, “Cinema’s Compassionate Gaze: Empathy, Affect, and Aesthetics in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” in Cine-Ethics: Ethical Dimensions of Film Theory, Practice, and Spectatorship, ed. Jinhee Choi and Mattias Frey (Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 2013), 28–30.
Cognitive Film and Media Ethics. Wyatt Moss-Wellington, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197552889.003.0001
our thinking about its operations may become, but none of this solves our inherent predicament in merely being; any ethics drawn from social sciences must very carefully account for this dilemma, that of “the autonomy of morality.”2 There is no clear purpose laid out with respect to nature other than simply survival, and we must, it seems, determine what to do day by day, our series of ought scripts, without firm guidance from science or nature. As Michael D. Jackson notes in Existential Anthropology:
Evolutionary biology reminds us that there are 50 million species of life on earth, hence 50 million solutions to the problems of survival. Human societies, though less diverse, may be viewed in the same way. But each is a solution, not only to the problems of adaptation and subsistence, but to the problem of creating viable forms of existence and coexistence.3
The question therefore arises: who are we to say that any of these solutions are, in fact, wrong? Social science and ethics seem at first to be strange bedfellows. And yet we must make these determinations, as the alternative is simply no action at all. If all action entails degrees of causal consequences, and we must act, then we need frameworks for decision-making, and this book argues that such frameworks will be better the more evidence for the likely consequences of actions they are willing to encounter.
Cognitive science and moral psychology present is claims about how people arrive at their ought claims; moving in the reverse, to use those is foundations to answer ought questions is much more problematic.4 In fact, some theorists doubt that knowledge in moral psychology can or should be extrapolated to any normative ought claims at all.5 But if our object of study is human communications in their mediated and persuasive capacities, and we aim to evaluate both their rhetorical effects and potential moral consequences, then some evidenced modeling of moral thoughts and behavior can assist in rendering such judgments more realistic in their causal projections.6 Sinnerbrink writes, “Even if we could produce an evolutionary explanation of, say, racism or sexism, that would still leave open
2 Thomas Nagel, “Ethics as an Autonomous Theoretical Subject,” in Morality as a Biological Phenomenon: The Presuppositions of Sociobiological Research, ed. Gunther S. Stent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 198–205.
3 Michael D. Jackson, Existential Anthropology (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), xxi.
4 See David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1896] 1978), 469.
5 Ronald Dworkin, “Objectivity and Truth: You’d Better Believe It,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 25, no. 2 (1996): 87–139.
6 Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, “Framing Moral Intuition,” in Moral Psychology, vol. 2., The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 47–76; Kelby Mason, “Moral Psychology and Moral Intuition: A Pox on All Your Houses,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 89, no. 3 (2011): 441–458.
the normative question of its moral wrongness or its cultural-political dangers, which is not a question readily addressed using scientific theories.”7 This may be true, but while evolutionary biology or social science may not directly answer those questions, it can certainly inform an answer to them. Scientific theories and knowledge must have a place at the table in developing a mutual determination of how we ought to proceed; the challenge is to define what sort of place that should be (and as such, it is also the remit of this introduction). At the political level, for instance, we might like to see policy-making more informed by climate science, and at the individual level, we might observe that carbon labeling on food products arms consumers with the evidence to make decisions more in line with their values.8 Evidence improves our ethical frameworks for decisionmaking, and so science ought to be part of ethical deliberation—and this should be true, too, of the questions of narrative and art we have traditionally contended with in the humanities. The place of science’s descriptive is questions in normative ethics is really quite simple: while science will not tell us what moral ends anyone should have in mind, as this is a question that can never be concluded, it will help us test our theories of the consequences of certain actions, and therefore assist in developing the means to achieve an agreed-upon moral end (the implication that human sciences are best suited to support consequentialist ethical frameworks is addressed in the second chapter, and emerges from a history of ethical approaches to screen media).9
Recent works in cognitive media ethics, in particular Plantinga’s Screen Stories, but also surveys of the field such as Sinnerbrink’s chapter “Cinempathy” in Cinematic Ethics, have been self-avowedly metaethical in their lines of questioning.10 In contrast, my aim here is not to make a claim for the way film or screen media “operates” ethically: as a place of moral experimentation, as a moral teacher, or as an intersubjective negotiator. Cases have been made for all of these moral experiences; I agree with Raymond A. Mar and Keith Oatley that “narratives allow us to try out solutions to emotional and social difficulties through the simulation of these experiences,” with bell hooks that “even though most folks will say that they go to movies to be entertained, if the truth be told lots of us, myself included, go to movies to learn,” and with Jane Stadler that “the kind of connectedness to others which is both embodied and illustrated in film”
7 Robert Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Film (London: Routledge, 2016), 85.
8 Adrian R. Camilleri et al., “Consumers Underestimate the Emissions Associated with Food but Are Aided by Labels,” Nature Climate Change 9 (2019): 53–58.
9 Joshua Greene, “From Neural ‘Is’ to Moral ‘Ought’: What Are the Moral Implications of Neuroscientific Moral Psychology?” Nature Reviews: Neuroscience 4, no. 10 (2003): 846–849.
10 Carl Plantinga, Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics, 80–106.
occasions an ethic in situating the spectator within its relationally causal world.11 Yet it is a fundamental principle of social narratology that stories perform many social functions concurrently, and any text can offer these ethical utilities at the same time as the means to contradict its potential for contributing to moral concern.12 Instead, in the ensuing chapters I want to elaborate how mediated storytelling may serve us better, how it could be improved. Toward this end, I address a multiplicity of ethical questions arising in media studies: questions regarding the conditions under which screen stories are produced, the ideas they promote, how audiences respond to those ideas, how they are then discussed and analyzed by theorists and other commentators, and the intersecting relationship between these ideas and the ethical actions they might inspire.
In this book, “ethics” and “morality” signify the same field of study with slightly different connotations. I use “ethics” to suggest a more deliberative consideration of future actions that entails, at the very least, a pressure to be aware of its alternatives; this need not be a scholarly deliberation, but it is a reflexive one. “Morality” suggests somewhat more intuitively generated and culturally informed processes of reaction and arbitration, both internally and within rule-bound publics. In this I differ from, for instance, accounts by Emmanuel Levinas that have given ethics primacy as informing an initial “encounter” and express morality as a post hoc application of rules governing behavior.13 For Levinas, ethics is intrinsic response and morality is later thought—the opposite of how I am using the two terms and the opposite of how they tend to be used in psychology literature. In a way, I am interested in bridging the space between somewhat deterministic notions of moral judgment in predictively motivated experimental psychology and the deliberative struggle of ethics in philosophy, which establishes the reader as a freethinking agent. In the following chapters, I show how the cognitive humanities can look backward to past evidence of moral behaviors in order to look probabilistically forward in deciding on ethical courses of action.
This book does not, I must stress, advocate any manner of regressive or unthinking moralism—a charge that has been leveled against both ethically normative modes of investigation and hermeneutic moral criticism. The word “normative” and its derivation from “norms” suggest notions of human normalcy, a traditional bugbear in the humanities. Coupled with this is a suspicion
11 Raymond A. Mar and Keith Oatley, “The Function of Fiction Is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 3, no. 3 (2008): 183; bell hooks, Reel to Real: Race, Sex and Class at the Movies (New York: Routledge, 1996), 2; Jane Stadler, Pulling Focus: Intersubjective Experience, Narrative Film, and Ethics (New York: Continuum, 2008), 61.
12 Wyatt Moss-Wellington, Narrative Humanism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 45.
13 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).
of the imperial terminology of morality and ethics, carrying with them the postcolonial baggage of appeals to Eurocentric authority. Jinhee Choi and Mattias Frey write that “for the film theorists of the 1970s, the terms moral or moral criticism have been tainted with severe ideological connotations to mean a reinforcement of the dominant political ideology.”14 This tradition of minimalizing directly moral critique in academic discourse continued, of course, long after the 1970s. For instance, Robert Stam continues to take issue with the “Victorian associations” of the word “morality” and its use in cognitive media studies.15 For Alain Badiou, meanwhile, the language of contemporary ethics simply is conservative propaganda.16 But questions of ideology favored in cultural studies similarly ask how people arrive at systems of ethical belief, and a load of meaning applied to the term “ideology” conceals agendas of ethical inquiry on behalf of the researchers themselves that in turn hedge their more normative and less relativist principles. As Lisa Downing and Libby Saxton put it, “The importance of reifying ‘ethics’ is itself a part of an ethical project.”17 Wayne C. Booth noted in 1988 that despite the recantation of ethical modes of engagement with fiction, moral language remains prevalent yet buried in the discourse of many fields of cultural criticism:
It is practiced everywhere, often surreptitiously, often guiltily, and often badly, partly because it is the most difficult of all critical modes, but partly because we have so little serious talk about why it is important, what purposes it serves, and how it might be done well.18
This observation remains true even after the (meta)ethical turn, and it is one founding principle of this book that if we are honest about the ethical values we bring to our practices of analysis and evaluation, they will be better. It is harder work to locate Hanna Meretoja’s “sense of possibility . . . the ability to see alternatives to what is presented to us as self-evident and inevitable,”19 and it is this rigor that I insist upon: reconfiguring past philosophic preoccupations with truth and belief to render them more specific about the ways in which belief
14 Jinhee Choi and Mattias Frey, eds., Cine-Ethics: Ethical Dimensions of Film Theory, Practice, and Spectatorship (Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 2013), 7.
15 Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 245.
16 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (New York: Verso, 2001), 38.
17 Lisa Downing and Libby Saxton, Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters (London: Routledge, 2010).
18 Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 19.
19 Hanna Meretoja, The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 90.
contributes to action, and actions affect others—and then to suggest new courses of action.
There is good reason, however, for a suspicion not so much of any moral discourse, but of moral certitude—and this is perhaps especially true in the context of increasing group polarization in digital media landscapes.20 The whiff of polemic carries with it a moralism that has not extended itself to reflect upon a lineage of diffuse cause and consequence, as when one studies any moral action deeply one must be open to its lack of definitive genesis, with its cultural and biological antecedents both unendingly heritable and invisibly distributed; and when one is open to the lack of a definitive genesis, one is also open to a dialogue with no moral center, no point at which one may halt to dole out sins. Oblique approaches to ethics and professional lexicons full of hedging terms find their impetus here: hedging language signals the recognition of such a heteronomy. This recognition in turn explains why writing in the humanities comprises more hedging terms than other scholarly disciplines.21 Still, at some point enough conviction must necessarily be untethered from doubt to carry forward into action. The radical political action many humanities scholars yearn for thrives on moral certitude, yet moral certitude is at the same time recognized as a problem, and so philosophers of media are concerned with qualities of media that may inspire self-doubt and disbelief: reflexivity, emotional distanciation, and all manner of countercultural, experimental production techniques that call for an audience to stop and to think. Historically, media theorists have wanted political convictions both fortified and questioned in media: presumably, convictions the theorist agrees with fortified, and those they don’t, questioned. At worst, however, hedging language can “introduce conjecture and inference as reliance” or misrepresent the aggregate of an important scientific consensus.22 To this end, the rigors of cognitive science can reveal and open a discourse upon normative values that are otherwise held intuitively or implicitly, airing them and calling for precision in lieu of conjecture or inference.23 In this book I argue for a language that is forthright about its moral goals but reasonably tentative about its conclusions. The rigor of normative reasoning is independent of dogma or self-certainty. There is room in cognitive theory, I believe, for an earnestness
20 For a good, current treatise on this polarization: Robert B. Talisse, Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in Its Place (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
21 Hassan Soodmand Afsha, Mohamad Moradi, and Raouf Hamzavi, “Frequency and Type of Hedging Devices Used in the Research Articles of Humanities, Basic Sciences and Agriculture,” Procedia: Social and Behavioral Sciences 136 (2014): 70–74.
22 Douglas E. Ott, “Hedging, Weasel Words, and Truthiness in Scientific Writing,” Journal of the Society of Laparoendoscopic Surgeons 22, no. 4 (2018): 1–4; Adriana Bailey, Lorine Giangola, and Maxwell T. Boykoff, “How Grammatical Choice Shapes Media Representations of Climate (Un)certainty,” Environmental Communication 8, no. 2 (2014): 197–215.
23 Guy Kahane, “The Armchair and the Trolley: An Argument for Experimental Ethics,” Philosophical Studies 162, no. 2 (2013): 421–445.
in ethics that retains both the rigor and self-critique that have been so valuable in past media and cultural studies. Just as empiricism and science do not make claims on behalf of truth or proofs or ontic certainties, only probabilities that we should proceed with and incrementally revise, so too must a consequentialist ethics admit the flaws in any moral position, as well as the uncertainty surrounding projected consequences of future actions, and make its cases for least-worst or least-problematic solutions. We can have an earnest, normative ethics without moral certitude, as this is precisely what being and nature have provided for us: we can know nothing absolutely, least of all a purpose to living, but still we must act.
When we are honest about our ethical commitments, they become vulnerable as they are rendered more contestable; they are subject to counterclaims and testing against evidence. It is far easier, but less rigorous as Booth notes, to leave moral readings implied. This is true, too, of political ideologies, as Sarah Kozloff writes:
Nearly all politically inclined film theorists avoid declaring their own political orientation. Their writings rest on a not-said presupposition of shared values and ideologies. Of course, scholarship should not be about the author herself, and one wants to present one’s arguments as if they were purely objective. But when discussing ideological and social aspects of our field, perhaps open selfdisclosure provides important perspective. Perhaps using “I” as opposed to passive voice constructions also makes the author take responsibility for the views she espouses.24
In my case, the moral and political ends cognitive science will be motivated toward could be broadly defined as harm minimization and improving equality across a global populace; other moral ends are considered important insofar as they support these two primary goals.25 For instance, some freedoms will support harm minimization and fairness while other types of freedom may impede them, which makes freedom secondary to other moral ends in my framework. A sense of justice likewise must support harm minimization, or it is not truly justice (the problems of justice and consequence are considered further in the following chapters). Similarly to Kozloff, Plantinga observes:
24 Sarah Kozloff, “Empathy and the Cinema of Engagement: Reevaluating the Politics of Film,” Projections 7, no. 2 (2013): 1.
25 What Jonathan Haidt calls “moral foundations” I am characterizing as the more active “moral goals,” as Haidt is making an is claim that emphasizes intuitive judgments, while my aim here is to clarify for the reader the moral ends of my own ought claims. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon, 2012).
Ideology, politics, and social responsibility are all thoroughly and inextricably dependent on moral value, and any sort of specific position on ideology or social responsibility presumes fundamental moral principles. The ideological and political positions of estrangement theorists are themselves rooted in moral suppositions about how people ought to be treated, what stance ought to be taken in relation to dominant culture, or how spectators ought to respond to screen stories. That these assumptions mostly go unexamined is a weakness of much ethical theory, such that one could almost see moral value as the repressed of contemporary film and media theory. Critics are so eager to avoid “moralism” that they ignore or deny the place of moral principles in their own thought.26
This book is equally concerned with notions of scholarly rigor: the rigors of ethical honesty, of backing one’s claims with evidence, of the kind of thinkingthrough of thoughts that cognitive science is good at, and of normativity itself. Normativity has its very own rigor, too, and this is what I will argue for in the first part of the book: the rigor of advancing the question “so what?” Once theorists have established firm evidence for our moral responsiveness to media’s emotive and empathic suggestions, how should we then behave? The rigor of normativity is not about knowing the answers to these things with certainty; it is about simply broaching the question that is begged by the descriptive and metaethical work we have so far achieved, extending ourselves not simply to ask but to answer the question “so what?” Normativity is a rigor.
The following chapter charts a history of ethical debates in film and media studies, the philosophy of art, aesthetics, phenomenology, literary theory, and narratology to identify the traditions from which the field of cognitive media studies emerges and to suggest its future directions. Throughout this opening chapter, I build my own case for a consilience of rigors on which Cognitive Film and Media Ethics is predicated: the procedural rigors of consequentialism, the socially distributed rigors of contemporary cognitive science, the rigors of traditional narrative humanism that encourage consequentialists and social scientists to account for a variety of agentive perspectives and phenomenal positions, and most of all, the rigor of normativity that agrees to advance all such foundational descriptive rigors to more active conclusions. Chapter 2 moves to clarify a consequentialist ethical framework applied across case studies throughout the volume. In contrast to the union of virtue ethics and intuitionism that characterizes much prior cognitive work, I propose a humanistic consequentialism that integrates notions of human limits, capabilities, and shifting responsibilities. Chapter 3 runs with the analogy of rigors developed thus far to address the myriad problems
26 Plantinga, Screen Stories, 155.
that arise in any moral evaluation of media texts using cognitive science as a tool: problems of evaluating simulated actions in fictive storytelling, the potentially confounding heteronomy of personality and cultural variation, and distinguishing ethical and political approaches to cinema. Addressing these problems allows us to be more specific about what kinds of ethical claims can and should be made concerning media texts; this chapter thereby sharpens some of the problems in a normative approach to cognitive media studies and further outlines the perspective and methods that will be carried through the rest of the chapters in this volume. The remainder of the book offers five case studies, revealing how this normative work might be performed in various contexts.
Chapters 4, 5, and 6 analyze a number of filmic case studies to make separate ethical points. Chapter 4 addresses the use of spectatorial cognitive dissonance in focusing audiences on substantive moral elements within feature films. It finds the films of David Lynch wanting in their minimization of the consequences of gendered violence and looks at alternative, more positive uses of moral dissonance on screen. Chapter 5 investigates a particular kind of cognitive dissonance, that of humor, using Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren’s benign violation theory to compare satiric comedy in suburban ensemble films with other forms of American “shock” humor in domestic settings.27 This chapter is interested in how benign violations may help us isolate an ethics of comedy in media. Chapter 6 turns to politics in cinema more specifically, using concepts in social psychology and anthropology (in particular limerence and liminality) to explain some of the ethics embedded in romantic comedy cinema engaging with explicitly political themes. This chapter demonstrates the productive unity of cognitive and phenomenological approaches that Sinnerbrink calls for in Cinematic Ethics. These three chapters address concerns in cinema ethics, as film art has been a primary medium through which much prior cognitive work in screen media ethics has taken place. There is evidently something about the conventions of cinema that reaches deeply within the self-narratives of many people. Given this historic use of film as a philosophic catalyst, I too acknowledge the value in beginning with the foundations of past analytical work, moving outward comparatively to other media; in the final two chapters, I focus on television, and news and social media.
Chapter 7, which critiques the inherent self-flattery of some more recent dialogues on “quality” television, addresses why it may be that film remains such an important touchstone for so many, why it is such an impressive vehicle for investigating the relations between feeling and thinking, as Amy Coplan has it, putting one “in the mood for thought.”28 In contrast, this chapter looks at formal
27 Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren, “Benign Violations: Making Immoral Behavior Funny,” Psychological Science 21, no. 8 (2010): 1141–1149.
28 Amy Coplan, “In the Mood for Thought: Mood and Meaning in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner,” in Blade Runner, ed. Amy Coplan and David Davies (London: Routledge, 2015), 118.
aspects of millennial television that could be construed as a kind of bullying. It observes some confluences between the normalization of abusive behaviors in various popular television formats and rising support for populist leadership styles. However, it also looks forward to a potential new televisual canon that decenters the white male antihero and that is produced under less problematic industrial conditions. While Chapter 7 broadens the scope of this volume to include television ethics, taking a cue from recent works such as Plantinga’s Screen Stories that extend theories cultivated in film studies to other screen media, Chapter 8 moves outward again to think through contemporary issues in news media and social media in the age of promotional saturation, fabulation and fakery. It concludes with some thoughts on how we might address those problems in the very place that many of my colleagues might feel their greatest ethical and political impact being made: the classroom. Throughout this book, my focus is on popular media forms that are globally dominant, such as narrative film, and their effects on the world; this final chapter, in addressing news media and social media, presents two other popular formats that are integral to the ways in which we understand our place in the world and that inform how we choose to behave toward others.
To air our normative views is to render them subject to analysis; to make moral arguments vulnerable occasions the prospect of improving them. An earnest normativity does not allow theorists to wallow in cataloging the crimes of the past, but instead puts the onus on them to proffer suggestions for action. If we care about treating one another kindly, equally, and offering better, freer lives for all those who have suffered at the hands of a fortunate few, then we owe it to everybody to improve our normative claims through the rigors of clear, open, evidenced debate. The committed responsibility of these sorts of analytic and scientific rigors is precisely the pressure that cognitive theories have put on media studies in the past. This book is an extension of what I feel is cognitivism’s most productive ethos.
1 Cognitive Media Ethics
The Story So Far
Cognitive science at times appears to have as many meanings as it does people who identify as cognitivists. To some, it simply indicates an empirical grounding from which to approach all fields in human studies; to others, it is a productive interdisciplinarity between old and new fields in social science and philosophy studying the human and the mind, from anthropology and linguistics to neuroscience and artificial intelligence; and to scholars like myself, it is both of these things as well as its own kind of scholarly rigor, that of a procedural thinkingthrough of human emotions and thoughts and experiences, charting the evidence of their causal relationships.1 Cognitivism is valuable as a unique kind of precision: it puts pressure on theorists not to simply state the ways in which culture produces ideology, but to explain each step in the process whereby ideas and actions are generated and distributed in the social world. This does not mean that cognitive theory cannot be practiced poorly or that it is immune to critique (in its best iterations, care is taken to guard against overly deterministic or “computational” metaphors). Yet it does at the very least entail an ongoing pressure not only to cite empirical evidence for one’s claims (from any discipline that studies the mind or human sociality), but to elaborate procedurally the many paths between precognitive responses, conscious meaning-making, rehearsed attitudes, behavior, and its consequences for others, that adjacent theories might gloss. In this regard, the rigor of cognitivism is that it elaborates processes, causes, and consequences rather than assumes them connotatively—all the better, I think, to support consequentialist ethical positions. In this chapter, I survey recent work in cognitive film, screen, and narrative media ethics (abbreviated as “cognitive media ethics”), point to some of its foundations in earlier theories, and indicate how my own normative perspective will build upon their insights.
Cognitive approaches to media ethics in the past have come down to four Es (different, albeit, from the four Es of 4EA cognition): thus far, ethics has been reducible to emotion, empathy, and engagement. In 2016’s Cinematic Ethics,
1 For others, cognitive studies may signify an emphasis on biological rather than cultural explanations of human behaviour, although this seems more a cognitivism of anti-cognitivists than a position taken by many of my colleagues.
Cognitive Film and Media Ethics. Wyatt Moss-Wellington, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197552889.003.0002
Sinnerbrink wrote that the contributions cognitivism has made to the field of cine-ethics consist largely in the theorizing of two fields—emotion and empathy—and thus the field is broadly emergent from the “affective turn” in both film philosophy and ethics.2 The metaethics of cognitivism has indeed been concerned primarily with filling out descriptions of the ways in which formal qualities in media can provoke different kinds of emotion and empathy to differing ends of moral evaluation. Take, for instance, Margrethe Bruun Vaage’s recent work, The Antihero in American Television, which characterizes the ethical experience in television as a movement back and forth between the pleasures of fictional relief and the moral pointedness of reality checks; reality checks invite spectators to concentrate on moral consequences the narrative may previously have encouraged them to disregard.3 In these works, formal qualities in media inspire emotions that form the persuasive power of screen media texts.4 In some ways, these concerns in cognitive media ethics succeeded a movement that began in the Chicago neo-Aristotelian school of literary ethics, which emphasized the ways story “positioned the audience in relation to characters,” giving evaluation and judgment “a significant role in the trajectory of emotional responses generated by plots.”5 Yet one of the first significant interventions made by the cognitive media theorists moved against an inherited terminology of empathy, engagement, and in particular the moral politics of “focalization,” which were modified extensively in works by Noël Carroll, Murray Smith, and Carl Plantinga. Elaborating on some of Carroll’s earlier work on sympathy and antipathy, Smith argued in 1995’s Engaging Characters that we do not merely identify with characters, we form allegiances that are based upon moral values rather than simply focalization (in his terms, “alignment”), and that fictive moral systems can encourage us to feel an allegiance to the least-wrong character in a given scenario rather than to morally perfect characters representative of absolute principles, including those shared by the viewer.6 These allegiances were more complex—messy, even—than the determinism of past perspectival theories that suggest we simply align with those we identify with. Vaage has joined Smith in extending this perspective, too, to make clear the point that character alignments and allegiances developed in narrative are not necessarily allied to moral principles held outside of fictive worlds; and those identified as the most moral characters may not receive the most viewer support, either, potentially as
2 Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics, 80–106. On the affective turn: Stadler, Pulling Focus, 29.
3 Margrethe Bruun Vaage, The Antihero in American Television (New York: Routledge, 2016).
4 Plantinga, Screen Stories, passim.
5 James Phelan, “Narrative Ethics,” in The Living Handbook of Narratology, ed. Peter Hühn (Hamburg: Hamburg University, 2014), last modified December 9, 2014, http://www.lhn.unihamburg.de/article/narrative-ethics.
6 Noël Carroll, “Toward a Theory of Film Suspense,” Persistence of Vision 1, no. 1 (1984): 65–89; Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
we do not feel as akin to moral paragons as we do to protagonists on a journey of moral learning, and one common viewing pleasure is to observe the moral growth of protagonists with whom the viewer feels allied.7
Much of the recent work in cognitive media ethics, from Plantinga to Vaage, has attempted to anatomize these character evaluations in order to understand how they operate. All are similarly motivated by a view that the moral reasoning applied during media engagement diverges from convictions spectators may hold outside of media, so the work of the analyst should be to explain those discrepancies and how media navigates them by harnessing cognitions predating formats such as film and TV (especially forms of sympathy/empathy) to produce its entertaining effects. For instance, Vaage’s concepts of fictional relief and reality checks are drawn from theories developed in moral psychology, in particular Joshua Greene and Jonathan Haidt’s “dual-process model of morality” and Albert Bandura’s “moral disengagement,” to demonstrate how media acts upon inclinations that are not necessarily unique to spectatorship.8 So the appeals to pathos that make up moral reasoning through narrative can be medium-specific, while the cognitive processes they rely upon are not.
One idea that Smith’s book inaugurated, with its broadly ethical cast, was a somewhat surprising divorce of empathy and ethics as inherently, uncomplicatedly causal: we could no longer assume that one fundamentally presaged the other. Smith suggests that the very imaginative process of empathy, feeling what we imagine another to feel, does not mean we fuse our goals with the other in any way, and this is true, too, of fictive characters.9 A new lexicon has since developed that is careful to point to the spaces between types of empathy and any ethics drawn from modes of character engagement: we can have sympathy for, wishing well for, affiliation with, recognition of, or projection onto a character, for instance, and each different relation to character may equally differentiate moral responses to the text. This trend of complexifying both descriptions of varying levels of empathy and allegiance, and the assumed effects of empathy and allegiance, has proceeded apace. In 2009’s Moving Viewers, Plantinga advised steering clear of “trendy” distinctions between empathy and sympathy altogether, as their imprecision opens up many dialogues speaking at cross-purposes.10 Not
7 Samuel Cumming, Gabriel Greenberg, and Rory Kelly, “Structures of Allegiance and Morality,” SCSMI Virtual Conference, June 18, 2020.
8 Joshua Greene and Jonathan Haidt, “How Does Moral Judgement Work?” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6, no. 12 (2002): 517–523; Albert Bandura, “Selective Moral Disengagement in the Exercise of Moral Agency,” Journal of Moral Education 3, no. 2 (2002): 101–119.
9 Smith, Engaging Characters, 97. Similarly, Ed Tan insists that empathy and emotion are not causal, as “empathy does not always result in an emotion”; ethics is absent from this account. Ed Tan, “The Empathic Animal Meets the Inquisitive Animal in the Cinema: Notes on a Psychocinematics of Mind Reading,” in Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies, ed. Arthur P. Shimamura (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 339.
10 Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 99–101.
only this, the emotions that theorists of empathy and sympathy were attempting to extricate often arrived together with other, observer-specific emotions; similarly to Smith, Plantinga notes that because all emotions are mixed and are far from discrete, we never quite fuse emotional states with another. Dialogues on the nature of empathy exist at the crossroads of many disciplines, and as such, the debate is broad and often confusing, with many overlapping and interrelated definitions. As Stadler writes:
In contemporary film criticism there is little consensus regarding how to differentiate empathy from related terms including sympathy, the vicarious experience and embodied and imaginative simulation that cinematic narratives facilitate, the involuntary sharing of affective states via emotional contagion, the ethical deliberation often involved in perspective taking, or moral emotions such as compassion.11
One suspects it is best not to kick a hornet’s nest and proclaim a strident definition for all to follow, and to be diverted into assessing descriptive claims of the nature of empathy would run contra to the objectives of this book—and yet clarification of one’s own terms seems necessary in such a contested space. A distinction I have found helpful and that I will carry through the book is that between cognitive and affective empathy. Clearly it is possible to imagine the emotions of another without vicariously feeling them. To bring a moral point to this, a torturer, for example, derives very different emotions from their imaginings of what a victim is going through. So we can have a cognitive empathy, which refers to a concept of another’s experience, and an affective empathy, which is when we vicariously feel an affect associated with or “congruent” to that experience. We can also let “empathy” be an umbrella term that refers to a complex set of interrelated processes each worthy of its own examination. What is often missing from accounts of felt empathy as a moral dimension in responses to screen fiction, though, is how that empathy may translate to belief and then behavior, which are more ethically evaluable than any experience of empathy itself. While there are many interesting studies on the nature of emotional mimicry via screen fictions, on formal qualities of narrative media and their effect on Theory of Mind, or on mirror neurons and what they mean for empathy, what is often less apparent is how that empathic experience might then be marshaled to draw particular moral conclusions, or extended to feelings toward nonfictive others outside of cinema, or who is
11 Jane Stadler, “Empathy in Film,” in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy, ed. Heidi Maibom (London: Routledge, 2017), 317.
included and who is excluded from moral conclusions derived from the empathic experience.12
Plantinga’s Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement, released in 2017, is perhaps the most comprehensive book yet addressing the metaethics of screen media from a cognitive perspective. Plantinga argues for an “engagement theory” in lieu of the emotional “estrangement theory” so familiar in film studies, clearly drawing from Kozloff’s notion of a “cinema of engagement,” itself reaching back—as many cognitive media ethics do—to find support in Smith’s Engaging Characters. 13 Plantinga’s wide-ranging study is underscored by the conviction that it is the rhetorical power of emotions that makes screen stories persuasive, and thus we should study the emotions elicited in media engagement (and particularly character engagement) to understand their moral impact. To that end, he suggests a number of cognitive mechanisms that are contingent upon emotional responses to persuade. Narrative formats rely upon and activate schemas, with their causal sense-making from habituative, cognitive shortcuts.14 Paradigm scenarios can be thought of as two related types of schemas: association of a situation to an appropriate emotion, and of emotion to an appropriate action. As actuated in narrative media, Plantinga calls these narrative paradigm scenarios, and he sees them as coupled to genre conventions.15 So to Plantinga, it is through rehearsal and repetition of emotional associations to their consequences in media that moral concepts become habitual—but as narratives are spaces where schemas and paradigms are revisited, so too can those stories be places where they are redirected to new moral associations. All of these processes rely upon an emotive engagement with screen characters to be relevant to the ethical self (and they contribute to a sense of the moral language of a time and “cultural ecology” that feeds back in terms of “attunement” to persuasive messages). Plantinga’s model of change in this regard is largely similar to that of Carroll. Carroll offers a relatively simple model in explaining how character engagement might generalize back to schemas: when films furnish characters that some audiences may have intrinsic biases toward (such as ethnically or sexually diverse characters) with traits that are commonly received as morally favorable (such as courage and heroism), films can overwhelm negative identity associations with positive ones.16 Those positive associations are then better able to
12 Katalin E. Bálint and Brendan Rooney, “Narrative Sequence Position of Close-Ups Influences Cognitive and Affective Processing and Facilitates Theory of Mind,” Art & Perception 7, no. 1 (2019): 27–51; Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra, The Empathic Screen: Cinema and Neuroscience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
13 Plantinga, Screen Stories; Kozloff, “Empathy”; Smith, Engaging Characters
14 Plantinga, Screen Stories, 56–57.
15 Ibid., 232–233.
16 Noël Carroll, “Moral Change: Fiction, Film, and Family,” in Cine-Ethics: Ethical Dimensions of Film Theory, Practice, and Spectatorship, ed. Jinhee Choi and Mattias Frey (London: Routledge, 2014), 43–56.
