1 - The Moral Turn: From First Principles to Lay Moralities

Summary

To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world.

Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

This chapter engages with key concepts and debates in three bodies of literature that are significant to this study: the media ethics literature, the anthropology of moralities literature and the suffering literature.

This chapter begins by tracing the moral turn in media scholarship in the past decade and outlines some of the normative frameworks that scholars have borrowed and developed from moral philosophy. I argue that this new literature on media ethics can benefit from a more anthropological approach that examines lay moralities: judgments of right and wrong that people make in relation to the media. Whilst this argument is put forth within the media ethics literature (Born 2008; Zelizer 2008), I propose that the anthropology of moralities helps us to think more carefully about the relationship between normative principles and empirical realities as well as how we can examine everyday practices of television consumption as a moral context.

In the second main section of this chapter, I outline the key assumptions and debates in the literature on the anthropology of moralities. I reflect on how this framework, which attempts to describe people's moral frameworks as situated in specific socio-historical contexts, can be used to dialogue with the media ethics literature.

Finally, in the third main section of this chapter, I focus on existing approaches to suffering. I review definitions of suffering from moral philosophy and from anthropology and sociology. I divide the literature into two groups: the first approaches the problem of suffering from the perspective of the witness and the second describes the problem of suffering in the context of victims or sufferers themselves. It is necessary to review both bodies of work for my study, as my chosen empirical context locates the problem of suffering in both perspectives. Unlike existing studies in the media ethics literature, my research finds that most Filipino audiences identify themselves as poor and suffering. How they negotiate the competing moral demands of obligation to suffering others on television as well as their own desires for recognition and reward is a theme that runs through this book. Before we get there, however, it is necessary to trace the theoretical roots of my research.