Mass Media and Digital Culture

Abstract

Every day, every hour, every minute television and other mass media confront us with images of suffering and dying people all over the world. We see people suffering from natural disasters, war, famine, political murder and torture, terrorism, and so on. What are the implications of this for moral judgment? Since it understands moral judgment in terms of spectatorship, moral sentiment theory appears to be particularly suitable to answer this question. However, this approach also has significant limitations. In this section, I discuss morally relevant advantages and disadvantages of a moral sentiment approach to global suffering mediated by television. I will focus in particular on terrorism. In the next section, I will ask the question if and how violent videogames can stimulate empathy. My discussion will benefit from the insights gained in the previous chapters.