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Screen Stories and Moral Understanding considers the place of movies, streamed series, and television in the lives of viewers, paying particular attention to their role in leading to moral rumination and learning. The book considers how screen stories can transfer knowledge and cultivate sensibilities and responses. It shows how the affective responses of viewers and viewers' psychological relationships with fictional characters figure into the influence of narrative. It also describes the means by which institutions encourage and direct reflection on screen stories after the viewing has ended.
List of contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- by Carl Plantinga
- I. Moral Understanding
- 1. Clarifying Moral Understanding
- by Ted Nannicelli
- 2. Understanding (mis)understanding: Sally be a Lamb
- by Paul C. Taylor
- II. Transfer and Cultivation
- 3. Phenomenal Experience and Moral Understanding: A Framework for Assessment
- By Carl Plantinga
- 4. The Slow, Subtle, Small Effects of Filmic Narrative on Moral Understanding
- by Helena Bilandzic
- 5. Moral Conflict, Screen Stories, and Narrative Appeal
- by René Weber and Frederic Hopp
- 6. How Screen Stories Can Contribute to the Formation of Just Persons
- by Nicholas Wolterstorff
- III. Affect
- 7. Affect and Moral Understanding
- by Robert Sinnerbrink
- 8. Morality and Media: The Role of Elevation/Inspiration
- by Mary Beth Oliver
- IV. Character Engagement
- 9. Media Characters and Moral Understanding: Perspectives from Media Psychology
- by Allison Eden and Mathew Grizzard
- 10. Movies, Examples, and Morality: The Rhetoric of Admiration
- by Noël Carroll
- V. The Reflective Afterlife
- 11. What Roles Can Audiences Play in Generating Moral Understanding?
- by James Harold
- 12. On Reflecting on Reflections: The Moral Afterlife and Screen Studies
- by Wyatt Moss-Wellington
- 13. The Reflective Afterlife and the Ends of Imagining
- by Murray Smith
- Index
About the author
Carl Plantinga is Senior Research Fellow at Calvin University. Among his books are Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement (2018) and Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator's Experience (2009).
Summary
The stories we tell and show, in whatever medium, play varied roles in human cultures. One such role is to contribute to moral understanding. Moral understanding goes beyond moral knowledge; it is a complex cognitive achievement that may consist of one or more of the following: the ability to understand why, to ask the right questions, categorization, the application of models to specific incidents, or the capacity to make connections between morally charged situations that have a common underlying meaning.
While the disciplines of communication, psychology, philosophy, and film and media studies have all made significant scholarly progress on this issue, they make different grounding assumptions and use different terminologies. Screen Stories and Moral Understanding approaches the topic from an interdisciplinary perspective and explores the conditions under which stories we view on screens-movies, streamed series, and television-can lead to moral understanding in viewers.
In five sections, this book explores the nature of moral understanding in relation to screen stories, the means by which moving image fictions can transfer knowledge to and cultivate perspectives in viewers, the role of affect in generating moral understanding, the viewer's engagement with characters, and what we do with screen stories after viewing them.
