Morality on Television

Abstract

Television creates what I will call a ‘moral imaginary’; the various aspects of other peoples’ lives seen through the small screen swirl in an imaginary realm that is shared among people in a variety of ways. I will develop this idea of a moral imaginary later, especially in Chapter 8, but here I want to show simply that television programmes can have moral content that fits with the traditional themes of morality addressed by philosophers. The philosophic tradition has tended to discuss morality in terms of the intrinsic qualities of individuals (virtue), the principles by which their conduct is guided (duty) or the consequences of individuals’ actions (seeking greatest good for the greatest number), and the content of television programmes can be seen as fitting with these approaches. This approach has been used as a way to make sense of literature (see, for example, the pieces collected in Pojman, 2000) and, more recently, computer games (see Schulzke, 2010) but not, surprisingly, television. The three themes I want to discuss – the good, the dutiful and the fair – would be, in principle, discoverable in any programme, but some are more relevant than others. What follows is not intended to be sophisticated philosophical debate but simply to draw out the connections between the narrative logic of television programmes and some well-established philosophical ideas about morality – virtue, duty and liberal utilitarianism. However, before I show how these themes are the stuff of television programmes, it is important to recognise that the issue of moral impact of television has been a contentious issue since if first began.