Moral Cognitive Cinema and its Ethical Spectatorship

Abstract

I believe that watching exemplary films can make people more compassionate and change us for the better and as such I make a case for their efficacy as instruments for correction. Refining contemplative moral reasoning in order to stimulate responsive and responsible social agency requires the foregrounding of approaches that promote other engagement. In addition to providing diversionary entertainment consummate films insist that the spectator be engaged, moved, stimulated and impelled to reflect and reassess their values and behavior. Their affective repertoire may animate the productive empathy which is capable of crystallizing into an ethical conviction focusing on social cooperation and connection. The potency of teaching people emotional empathy via film in order to enhance moral reasoning appears to be encouraged and supported by scientific studies. There are intricate links between the empathic and embodied responses to film and its ethical consequences. Neuroscientific research is investigating the importance of the somatic body’s response to stimuli and its impact on decision-making. Its examining the ways in which interoceptive awareness moderates neural activity, how the emotionally and morally critical limbic system coheres with embodied simulation and theory of mind circuits during an empathic experience, and the influence of affect and visceral response in moral evaluation. All of these elements apply directly to the film spectator’s experience and points to the potential for a moral cognitive cinema which champions the fundamental value of empathic concern and encourages the promise of an ethical spectatorship as a corrective. Combining empathy’s role in moral cognition with film spectatorship studies is a critical endeavour that I encourage in attempts to find proactive solutions to contemporary society’s increasing social fragmentation and conflict. My conjecture is that an exemplary cinema with a strategic compassionate focus can reshape and re-conceptualize spectatorship in the service of enhanced social, moral and ethical behaviour.