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{{no footnotes, date=September 2010 Visual ethics is an emerging interdisciplinary field of scholarship that brings together religious studies, philosophy, photo and video journalism, visual arts, and cognitive science in order to explore the ways human beings relate to others ethically through visual perception. Historically, the field of
ethics Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that "involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior".''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' The field of ethics, along with aesthetics, concerns m ...
has relied heavily on rational-linguistic approaches, largely ignoring the importance of seeing and visual representation to human moral behavior. At the same time, studies in visual culture tend to analyze imagistic representations while ignoring many of the ethical dimensions involved. Visual ethics is a field of cross-fertilization of ethics and visual culture studies that seeks to understand how the production and reception of visual images is always ethical, whether or not we are consciously aware of this fact.


Ethics of visual production

On the one hand, visual ethics is concerned with ethical issues involved in the production of visual images. For example, how do representations in newsmedia deploy cultural codes of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and so on in order to create distance from or empathy with specific people and groups? How can visual representations of the other facilitate or foreclose certain ethical responses from viewers? When is it ethically justifiable to capture and share images of another person in a moment of vulnerability? With whom should such images be shared?


Ethics of visual reception

Visual ethics is equally concerned with the ethics of reception, that is, with seeing as an ethical act. How do different images influence our ethical responses and moral behavior in different ways? To what extent do our ethical responses to images take place pre-reflectively, by visual-perceptual processes in the body-mind, before images even come to consciousness? It can be looked upon more into the cultural perception. It always depends on the cultural background.


Ethics and visual arts

This topic focuses on ethical theories and methods of ethical reasoning. Controversies and arguments abound as ethical decisions, or the lack thereof, continue to play a role in institutional practice. With the increasing gap between commerce and culture, the prioritization of good business over public service creates an increasingly blurry set of ethical guidelines. Collector-based exhibitions, conflicts of interest, and the de-accessioning practices of collections. One might ask do museums have a responsibility to their public? And if so, is this a part of institutional culture and is it being taught in today's museum studies programs?
Elaine A. King Elaine A. King is a curator, critic, professor, and editor. Background Elaine A. King was born in Oak Park, Illinois. She received a joint interdisciplinary Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1986 from the School of Speech (Theory and Cultur ...
and co-editor Gail Levin addressed many of these issues in the anthology they compiled titled "Ethics and The Visual Arts" published in September 2006 by Allworth Press in New York. This volume of 19 essays explores a diverse range of topics about ethics in the visual arts. The dark side of the arts is explored in this volume with nineteen diverse essays by such distinguished authors as Eric Fischl, Suzaan Boettger, Stephen Weil, Richard Serra, and more cover a broad range of topics facing today's artists, policy makers, art lawyers, galleries, museum professionals, and more.


Visual Ethics Symposium

In April 2007, under the direction of
Timothy Beal Timothy K. Beal (born 1963) is a writer and scholar in the field of religious studies whose work explores matters of religion, media, and American culture, past and present. He is Distinguished University Professor, Florence Harkness Professor of R ...
of the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities and William E. Deal of the Inamori Center for Ethics at
Case Western Reserve University Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) is a private research university in Cleveland, Ohio. Case Western Reserve was established in 1967, when Western Reserve University, founded in 1826 and named for its location in the Connecticut Western Reser ...
hosted an interdisciplinary group of scholars in the fields of philosophical ethics, religious studies, theology, visual culture studies, neuroscience, and cognitive science to develop the first research collaboration on visual ethics.


Further reading

Although Visual ethics is an emerging scholarly field, certain books in the fields of ethics, visual culture, and cognitive science have proven particularly influential thus far. *
Judith Butler Judith Pamela Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminism, queer theory, and literary theory. In 1993, Butler ...
(2004). Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. *
Antonio R. Damasio Antonio Damasio ( pt, António Damásio) is a Portuguese-American neuroscientist. He is currently the David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience, as well as Professor of Psychology, Philosophy, and Neurology, at the University of Southern California, ...
(1994). Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. New York: Grosset/Putnam. * Mark Johnson (1993). Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. * Elaine A. King and Gail Levin (2006). Ethics and The Visual Arts. New York: Allworth Press. *
Emmanuel Levinas Emmanuel Levinas (; ; 12 January 1906 – 25 December 1995) was a French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry who is known for his work within Jewish philosophy, existentialism, and phenomenology, focusing on the relationship of ethics to me ...
. 1969. Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. *
W.J.T. Mitchell William John Thomas Mitchell (born March 24, 1942) is an American academic. Mitchell is the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He is also the editor of ''Critical Inquiry'', a ...
(2006). What Do Pictures Want? Chicago: University of Chicago Press. * Kaja Silverman (1995). Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge. *
Susan Sontag Susan Sontag (; January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer, philosopher, and political activist. She mostly wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Her ...
(1973). On Photography. New York: Picador. *
Susan Sontag Susan Sontag (; January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer, philosopher, and political activist. She mostly wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Her ...
(2004). Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Penguin.


External links


A Question of Truth: Photojournalism and Visual Ethics
by Donald R. Winslow

by Margaret Miles and S. Brent Plate Art criticism Social ethics Film theory