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7523 results in Ethics

Page 222 of 377

  • Part II - After the Deluge

  • Julian Petley, Brunel University
  • Book:
    Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    05 August 2013
    Print publication:
    17 May 2011, pp 49-54

  • Summary

    The chapters in Part II of this book take up the story of video, and to a lesser extent, film, censorship in the wake of the passing of the Video Recordings Act 1984. They usefully illustrate the extent to which the fears of the critics of the Act aired in Part I were, and weren't, justified, but what gives them their particular interest is the light which they throw on the modus operandi of the BBFC's remarkable Director, James Ferman.

    Ferman had been appointed as the Secretary of what was then the British Board of Film Censors in 1975, an extremely difficult time for the institution. In 1971 the wily and diplomatically skilled John Trevelyan finally stepped down as Secretary and was replaced by the less affable and canny Stephen Murphy. During his time the Board was almost constantly assaulted by the Whitehouse brigade, angry politicians and censorious newspapers for passing films such as The Devils, Straw Dogs, A Clockwork Orange and Last Tango in Paris, albeit with cuts in most cases. Indeed, so alarmed was the Cinematograph Exhibitors' Association by the odium being heaped on its members for showing these kinds of films that its President publicly called for Murphy to step down. (Useful accounts of this period of turmoil for the Board can be found in Mathews 1994: 189–215, and Robertson 1989: 134–57.) Essentially Ferman was appointed by the BBFC President Lord Harlech to reform the Board and to restore its credibility, which he did remarkably successfully.

  • 12 - ‘The Way Things Are Now’: An Interview with Robin Duval

  • from Part IV - New Millennium, New Beginning?
  • Julian Petley, Brunel University
  • Book:
    Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    05 August 2013
    Print publication:
    17 May 2011, pp 163-172

  • Summary

    JP: How do you take Christopher Tookey in the Daily Mail describing you as ‘less notorious but no less permissive’ than James Ferman?

    RD: I don't particularly enjoy being referred to as notorious, and I don't particularly like being described as permissive, but I've no special objection to liberal, and I don't mind at all being characterised as a director of the BBFC who has moved things on into the twenty-first century. That inevitably involves a degree of liberalisation because that is the way the British community has moved.

    JP: You've certainly introduced much greater openness and transparency into the Board's operations.

    RD: One of the difficulties with the Board throughout a large part of its history was that, because it wasn't fashionable in those days to be reasonably up-front about decision-making criteria, it left an awfully large space available for newspapers and others who were hostile to the Board to fill in their own interpretations; naturally, in the absence of proper explanation of what the Board had been doing, those interpretations were factually all over the place. So, as far as I'm concerned, transparency is not simply a duty in the modern age which should be imposed on any regulator, it's also extremely advantageous in making sure that the starting point for any public argument is one that the regulator can actually recognise.

    JP: You've also speeded up the classification process, which makes it much more difficult for the press to agitate whilst controversial movies await certification.

  • 7 - ‘Not Suitable for Home Viewing’

  • from Part III - Nineties Nightmares
  • Julian Petley, Brunel University
  • Book:
    Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    05 August 2013
    Print publication:
    17 May 2011, pp 87-101

  • Summary

    By the early 1990s the ‘video nasty’ hysteria had subsided considerably from the levels it had reached during the first half of the previous decade, but a dreadful event on 12 February 1993 unleashed the deluge once again: this was the murder in Kirkby, Merseyside, of the two-year-old James Bulger by the ten-year-olds Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, who were convicted of the crime on 24 November 1993. The lurid, sensational and above all hate-filled reporting of the case by most British national newspapers marks the nadir of a journalistic culture infamous for its debased and degraded standards (for critical accounts of press reporting of the case, see Franklin and Petley (1996) and Green (2008)), but what concerns us here is the manner in which the popular press concocted and then spread the entirely untrue story that the older children had murdered the younger one under the influence of violent videos. Just how this ridiculous farrago emerged remains too little understood to this day, but as it was to lead directly to the further tightening of the Video Recordings Act, it is important to establish exactly what happened.

    ‘EXPOSURE TO VIOLENT VIDEO FILMS’

    The one factor that is now well known is that the judge in the case, the Honourable Mr Justice Morland, made the entirely unwarranted remark in his summing up that ‘it is not for me to pass judgement on their upbringing [sic] but I suspect that exposure to violent video films may be in part an explanation’. Here indeed is a media effect: eleven years of ‘video nasty’ stories had clearly done their work. However, one strongly suspects that there is an element of class dislike lurking in here too, as in so many cases of this kind.

  • 6 - The Video Image

  • from Part II - After the Deluge
  • Julian Petley, Brunel University
  • Book:
    Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    05 August 2013
    Print publication:
    17 May 2011, pp 71-80

  • Summary

    Last year the video industry in Britain celebrated its tenth birthday, and a decade of phenomenal growth. In December 1979, there were 230,000 video recorders in British homes; ten years later, there were 13.8 million. To buy an EMI three-hour blank tape in March 1979 would have cost you £14.50; today this would purchase a three-pack of four-hour tapes and still leave change to spare. By October 1981, there were still only 6,000 video outlets in the UK, of which only half carried a sizeable stock. According to Derek Mann of the Video Trade Association, there are now 5,500 independent specialist dealers, 3,000 high-street multiples such as Woolworth's and W. H. Smith involved in sell-through, and 17,000–20,000 outlets such as corner shops and garages which rent out videos on a relatively small scale.

    In 1979, the notion of selling videos for as little as £6.99 would have seemed outlandish; today, within four years of its launch, this is reckoned to be a market worth £300 million a year. It is estimated that 7 million videos a week are now rented, and that 30 million will have been bought in 1989 and that the industry as a whole enjoys an annual turnover of some £1 billion in terms of tape rentals and sales.

  • 11 - The Last Battle, or Why Makin' Whoopee! Matters

  • from Part III - Nineties Nightmares
  • Julian Petley, Brunel University
  • Book:
    Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    05 August 2013
    Print publication:
    17 May 2011, pp 129-158

  • Summary

    The Blair government is … old, old Labour. With one exception, it has run away from every libertarian challenge. It is profoundly illiberal. As Home Secretary, Jack Straw always wanted to make clear early in the conversation that he was not a liberal. Nor is Tony Blair. Liberal is a word that crosses Blair's lips as infrequently as socialist. The third way he seeks between these terms is the only one available: reliably and fiercely conservative. Hugo Young, ‘Final Proof That Labour Is Not Liberal’, Guardian, 18 July 2002

    In August 1999 the Video Appeals Committee (VAC), established under the Video Recordings Act, announced that seven videos which the British Board of Film Classification had refused to certificate at ‘R18’ (the licensed sex shop category) should be passed. These were Horny Catbabe, Nympho Nurse Nancy, TV Sex, Office Tart, the trailer for Carnival (international version), Wet Nurses 2 (continental version), and Miss Nude International (continental version).

    However, on 28 September, BBFC President Andreas Whittam Smith and Director Robin Duvall announced they were seeking judicial review of the decision

    because, in the Board's view, it is based on a definition of harm which is an incorrect interpretation of the Video Recordings Act. The VAC judgement, if allowed to stand, would have fundamental implications with regard to all the Board's decisions, including those turning upon questions of unacceptable levels of violence.

  • Part III - Nineties Nightmares

  • Julian Petley, Brunel University
  • Book:
    Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    05 August 2013
    Print publication:
    17 May 2011, pp 81-86

  • Summary

    This part of the book shows the BBFC at work in the 1990s, and covers James Ferman's last decade as its Director. Chapter 9 and the last part of Chapter 7 attempt to illustrate Ferman's somewhat idiosyncratic modus operandi, and suggest that at least some of the Board's problems in this decade were partly a result of his high-handedness and his pronounced tendency to sit on potentially troublesome films and videos in the hope that the problems which they apparently posed would somehow defuse themselves, whereas all too often – as in the case of Crash, for example – the lid finally blew off the pressure cooker in which a row had been slowly steaming away. But this part of the book, like the two preceding parts, also argues that the Board's activities cannot be explained simply in terms of its own internal dynamics or of the characteristics of its leading personnel, but need to be understood as being acted upon by various external factors. Crucial in this respect are the laws of the land (especially the Video Recordings Act and Obscene Publications Act) and how these are enforced by the police and the Crown Prosecution Service and interpreted by judges and magistrates, and the activities of politicians, who make those laws in the first place and also have the power to de-designate the BBFC as the body responsible for enforcing the Video Recordings Act.

  • 7 - Taking Life

  • Peter Singer, Princeton University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Practical Ethics
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    21 February 2011, pp 155-190

  • Summary

    At the end of the last chapter, we looked beyond abortion to the issue of infanticide, thus confirming the suspicions of supporters of the sanctity of human life that once abortion is accepted, euthanasia lurks around the corner. For them, that is an added reason for opposing abortion. Euthanasia has, they point out, been rejected by doctors since the fifth century BC, when physicians first took the Oath of Hippocrates and swore ‘to give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel’. Moreover, they argue, the Nazi extermination programme is a terrible modern example of what can happen once we give the state the power to kill innocent human beings.

    It is true that if one accepts abortion on the grounds provided in the preceding chapter, the case for killing other human beings, in certain circumstances, is strong. As I shall try to show in this chapter, however, this is not something to be regarded with horror, and the use of the Nazi analogy is utterly misleading. On the contrary, once we abandon those doctrines about the sanctity of human life that – as we saw in Chapter 4 – collapse as soon as they are questioned, it is the refusal to accept killing that, in some cases, is horrific.

    When the first edition of this book appeared in 1979, no country had legalized euthanasia, although in Switzerland a physician could prescribe lethal drugs to patients seeking aid in dying.

  • 9 - Climate Change

  • Peter Singer, Princeton University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Practical Ethics
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    21 February 2011, pp 216-237

  • Summary

    In the previous chapter, we briefly considered the argument that the only obligation we have to strangers is not to harm them. For most of human existence, that view would have been easy to live by. Our ancestors lived in groups of no more than a few hundred people, and those on the other side of a river or mountain range might as well have been living in a separate world. We developed ethical principles to help us to deal with problems within our community, not to help those outside it. The harms that it was considered wrong to cause were generally clear and well defined. We developed inhibitions against, and emotional responses to, such actions, and these instinctive or emotional reactions still form the basis for much of our moral thinking.

    Today, we are connected to people all over the world in ways our ancestors could not have imagined. The discovery that human activities are changing the climate of our planet has brought with it knowledge of new ways in which we can harm one another. When you drive your car, you burn fossil fuel that releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. You are changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere and, hence, the climate. What does this do to others?

  • 12 - Why Act Morally?

  • Peter Singer, Princeton University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Practical Ethics
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    21 February 2011, pp 276-296

  • Summary

    Previous chapters of this book have discussed what we ought, morally, to do about several practical issues and what means we are justified in adopting to achieve our ethical goals. The nature of our conclusions about these issues – the demands they make on us – raises a further, more fundamental question: why should we act morally?

    Take our conclusions about the use of animals for food, or the aid the rich should give the poor. Some readers may accept these conclusions, become vegetarians, and do what they can to reduce absolute poverty. Others may disagree with our conclusions, maintaining that there is nothing wrong with eating animals and that they are under no moral obligation to do anything about reducing absolute poverty. There is also, however, likely to be a third group: readers who find no fault with the ethical arguments of these chapters yet do not change their diets or their contributions to aid for the poor. Of this third group, some may just be weak-willed, but others may want an answer to a further practical question: if the conclusions of ethics require so much of us, they may ask, why should we bother about ethics at all?

    UNDERSTANDING THE QUESTION

    ‘Why should I act morally?’ is a different type of question from those that we have been discussing up to now. Questions like ‘Why should I treat people of different ethnic groups equally?’ or ‘Why is abortion justifiable?’ seek ethical reasons for acting in a certain way.

  • 10 - The Environment

  • Peter Singer, Princeton University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Practical Ethics
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    21 February 2011, pp 238-255

  • Summary

    A river tumbles through forested ravines and rocky gorges towards the sea. The state hydro-electricity commission sees the falling water as untapped energy. Building a dam across one of the gorges would provide three years of employment for a thousand people, and longer-term employment for twenty or thirty. The dam would store enough water to ensure that the state could economically meet its energy needs for the next decade. This would encourage the establishment of energy-intensive industry thus further contributing to employment and economic growth.

    The rough terrain of the river valley makes it accessible only to the reasonably fit, but it is nevertheless a favoured spot for bushwalking. The river itself attracts the more daring whitewater rafters. Deep in the sheltered valleys are stands of rare Huon pine, many of the trees being more than a thousand years old. The valleys and gorges are home to many birds and animals, including an endangered species of marsupial mouse that has seldom been found outside the valley. There may be other rare plants and animals as well, but no one knows, for scientists are yet to investigate the region fully.

    Should the dam be built? This is one example of a situation in which we must choose between very different sets of values. The description is loosely based on a proposed dam on the Franklin River, in the south-west of Australia's island state, Tasmania.

  • 2 - Equality and Its Implications

  • Peter Singer, Princeton University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Practical Ethics
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    21 February 2011, pp 16-47

  • Summary

    THE BASIS OF EQUALITY

    The period since the end of World War II has seen dramatic shifts in moral attitudes on issues like abortion, sex outside marriage, same-sex relationships, pornography, euthanasia and suicide. Great as the changes have been, no new consensus has been reached. The issues remain controversial, and the traditional views still have respected defenders.

    Equality seems to be different. The change in attitudes towards inequality – especially racial inequality – has been no less sudden and dramatic than the change in attitudes towards sex, but it has been more complete. Racist assumptions shared by most Europeans at the beginning of the twentieth century have become totally unacceptable, at least in public life. A poet could not now write of ‘lesser breeds without the law’, and retain – indeed enhance – his reputation, as Rudyard Kipling did in 1897. This does not mean that there are no longer any racists, but only that they must disguise their racism if their views and policies are to have any chance of general acceptance. The principle that all humans are equal is now part of the prevailing political and ethical orthodoxy. But what, exactly, does it mean and why do we accept it?

    Once we go beyond the agreement that blatant forms of racial discrimination are wrong and raise questions about the basis of the principle that all humans are equal, the consensus starts to weaken.

  • 3 - Equality for Animals?

  • Peter Singer, Princeton University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Practical Ethics
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    21 February 2011, pp 48-70

  • Summary

    RACISM AND SPECIESISM

    In the previous chapter, I gave reasons for believing that the fundamental principle of equality, on which the idea that humans are equal rests, is the principle of equal consideration of interests. Only a basic moral principle of this kind can allow us to defend a form of equality that embraces almost all human beings, despite the differences that exist between them. (The exceptions are human beings who are not and have never been conscious and therefore have no interests to be considered – a topic to be discussed in Chapters 6 and 7.) Although the principle of equal consideration of interests provides the best possible basis for human equality, its scope is not limited to humans. When we accept the principle of equality for humans, we are also committed to accepting that it extends to some nonhuman animals.

    When I wrote the first edition of this book, in 1979, I warned the reader that the suggestion I was making here might seem bizarre. It was then generally accepted that discrimination against members of racial minorities and against women ranked among the most important moral and political issues. Questions about animal welfare, however, were widely regarded as matters of no real significance, except for people who are dotty about dogs and cats. Issues about humans, it was commonly assumed, should always take precedence over issues about animals.

  • 1 - About Ethics

  • Peter Singer, Princeton University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Practical Ethics
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    21 February 2011, pp 1-15

  • Summary

    This book is about practical ethics, that is, about the application of ethics or morality – I shall use the words interchangeably – to practical issues. Though the reader may be impatient to get to these issues without delay, if we are to have a useful discussion within ethics, it is necessary to say a little about ethics so that we have a clear understanding of what we are doing when we discuss ethical questions. This first chapter, therefore, sets the stage for the remainder of the book. To prevent it from growing into an entire volume itself, it is brief and at times dogmatic. I cannot take the space properly to consider all the different conceptions of ethics that might be opposed to the one I shall defend, but this chapter will at least serve to reveal the assumptions on which the remainder of the book is based.

    WHAT ETHICS IS NOT

    Ethics is not Primarily About Sex

    There was a time, around the 1950s, when if you saw a newspaper headline reading RELIGIOUS LEADER ATTACKS DECLINING MORAL STANDARDS, you would expect to read yet again about promiscuity, homosexuality and pornography, and not about the puny amounts we give as overseas aid to poorer nations or the damage we are causing to our planet's environment. As a reaction to the dominance of this narrow sense of morality, it became popular to regard morality as a system of nasty puritanical prohibitions, mainly designed to stop people from having fun.

Practical Ethics
  • 3rd edition
  • Peter Singer
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    21 February 2011
  • For thirty years, Peter Singer's Practical Ethics has been the classic introduction to applied ethics. For this third edition, the author has revised and updated all the chapters and added a new chapter addressing climate change, one of the most important ethical challenges of our generation. Some of the questions discussed in this book concern our daily lives. Is it ethical to buy luxuries when others do not have enough to eat? Should we buy meat from intensively reared animals? Am I doing something wrong if my carbon footprint is above the global average? Other questions confront us as concerned citizens: equality and discrimination on the grounds of race or sex; abortion, the use of embryos for research and euthanasia; political violence and terrorism; and the preservation of our planet's environment. This book's lucid style and provocative arguments make it an ideal text for university courses and for anyone willing to think about how she or he ought to live.

  • 6 - Taking Life

  • Peter Singer, Princeton University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Practical Ethics
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    21 February 2011, pp 123-154

  • Summary

    THE PROBLEM

    Few ethical issues have been as bitterly fought over during the past forty years as abortion, and neither side has had much success in altering the opinions of its opponents. Until 1967, abortion was illegal in almost all the Western democracies except Sweden and Denmark. Then Britain changed its law to allow abortion on broad social grounds, and in the 1973 case of Roe v. Wade, the United States Supreme Court held that women have a constitutional right to an abortion in the first six months of pregnancy. Conservative presidents have changed the composition of the Supreme Court, but to date it has continued to uphold the core of the Roe v. Wade decision while allowing states to restrict access to abortion in various minor ways. In recent decades, European nations, including Roman Catholic countries like Italy, Spain and France, have liberalised their abortion laws. Even Ireland and Poland now permit abortion in some circumstances. Worldwide, only a handful of countries, mostly in Latin America, prohibit abortion entirely.

    In 1978, the birth of Louise Brown – the first human to have been born from an embryo that had been fertilised outside a human body – raised a new issue about the status of early human life. The achievement of Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe in demonstrating the possibility of in vitro fertilization, or IVF, was the result of several years of experimentation on early human embryos – none of which had survived – and since then more embryos have been used in experiments aimed at improving the success rate of this means of enabling otherwise infertile couples to have children.

  • 8 - Rich and Poor

  • Peter Singer, Princeton University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Practical Ethics
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    21 February 2011, pp 191-215

  • Summary

    SOME FACTS ABOUT POVERTY

    At the end of the twentieth century, the World Bank sent out a team of researchers to record the views of 60,000 women and men living in extreme poverty. Visiting seventy-three countries, the research team heard, over and over, that poverty meant these things:

  • You are short of food for all or part of the year, often eating only one meal per day, sometimes having to choose between stilling your child's hunger or your own, and sometimes being able to do neither.

  • You can't save money. If a family member falls ill and you need money to see a doctor, or if the crop fails and you have nothing to eat, you have to borrow from a local moneylender; he will charge you so much interest that the debt continues to mount, and you may never be free of it.

  • You can't afford to send your children to school; or if they do start school, you have to take them out again if the harvest is poor.

  • You live in an unstable house, made with mud or thatch that you need to rebuild every two or three years, or after severe weather.

  • You have no close source of safe drinking water. You have to carry it a long way, and even then, it can make you ill unless you boil it.

    • Along with these material deprivations goes, very often, a humiliating state of powerlessness, vulnerability and a deep sense of shame or failure.

Page 222 of 377