Sontag, some ethics

What do we expect from moral responsiveness when we describe the callousness of our response to photographs of horror? Nietzsche said that pity was the emotion of the weak, who react to events to which they have no connection and no power to change. Photographs capture a moment, preferably a moment with an event or action – the best news photos capture dynamism or its aftermath. At the same time, photographs are always of death, in that they refer (if we believe their veracity) to an event that has already occurred, and cannot be changed. Their power is also their disarming, in that the event, to which we know occurred, we also know to be past. The event always seems to tell the story, coinciding with the erasure of context. The moral callousness issue is a product of the photo’s seduction: we presume we see the moral story in its complete form, and that the event IS, providing the prerequisites for moral responsiveness. The context of images –displayed in an entertainment frame, competing with other stories (fictional, or no) that may be more appealing, and also in a context of continual image making, and the continual state of inaction that provides. There are a lot of wars, in a lot of places, and we don’t have access to all of them.

Every ethical calculus requires a consideration of what type of agent we perceive ourselves to be. This includes questions of what means of control and intervention we perceive ourselves to have, as well as consideration of the ‘goods’ we seek to protect. Lastly, the ethical decision includes consideration of more than outcome, achievement of goods, but also a question of whether we are satisfied with the calculus we entered into, the way we make decisions even if we fail in achieving our goals. The metaphor of the global village explains the way the call of callousness positions us in relation to suffering others. Not only to images appear near, we think of ourselves as physically near, but in a facile way. There is a sense of potency assumed, or implicitly hoped for. We wish to be able to intervene, to step in from a distance. The goods seem to be ‘avoidance of wanton human suffering’ – which is the only kind that can appear in photographs, which capture a moment and the fear of momentary decisions, preferably transition points in people’s lives. Two examples: “napalm girl” and the ‘execution of a viet cong soldier’ from the Vietnam war – in the pictures we see unnecessary suffering, but in both the context changes their meaning (the girl was immediately treated, the soldier was a man who just killed a small sum of the executioners colleagues). The last part: we really want to think we are moral, and that we can help in immediate ways – the outrage expressed at inaction serves as distancing and the creation of a moral calculus that the speaker finds acceptable, regardless of its usefulness.

Duncan