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Media & Values
Intimate Transgressions in a Changing Moral and Cultural Landscape
By David E. Morrison, Matthew Kieran, Michael Svennevig, Sarah Ventress Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2007 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-217-5
CHAPTER 1
The Philosophical Underpinnings
1 The Need for a Moral Language
This chapter sets the scene for later discussion of how people in our study talked about moral issues and the requirement of regulation. Although it is argued later that there is an absence of a moral language by which to judge cultural issues, following the focus group stage of the research two traditions of thought were identified that appeared to position how issues were framed. These two traditions were neo-Aristotelian and liberal.
Briefly, liberals, going back to the Enlightenment, tend to place primary emphasis on autonomy. The function of legislation and regulation is to enable us to lead our lives as we choose. Importantly this includes the freedom to make our own mistakes. Two basic constraints follow. Firstly, our freedom of choice should be enshrined and promoted to the greatest extent possible consistent with not infringing the basic rights of others. Thus, for a liberal, regulation is likely to concern issues such as harm or privacy intrusion but, importantly, matters of offence are as such considered irrelevant. Secondly, legislative and regulator y steps may be required in order to ensure meaningful choice. The communitarian critique of liberalism claims that it fails to recognize the role traditions and social practices play in constituting our lives as meaningful. The liberal attempt to maintain neutrality over different conceptions of the good life, it is argued, is impossible. Liberals either remain blind to the importance of identity and tradition or they must effectively privilege their own in favouring autonomy above all else. This critique lends itself to the neo-Aristotelian conception of our relation to the state. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle held that the good of the individual is intimately bound up with the good of the state and society as a whole. The point of legislation and regulation on this view is the cultivation of our well-being. Its aim is to promote the moral and social character of us all. Hence, in principle at least, nothing is an essentially private matter nor outside the remit of state regulation. We need governance to help us develop the virtues required for fulfilment and happiness. Neo-Aristotelians will tend to be more deferential with respect to 'moral authority', be more worried about issues of offence and consider regulation more easily justifiable and wide-ranging. Liberals, by contrast, are unconcerned with these things – except in so far as they intrude on our capacity to choose freely how to go about our lives. What we will be considering in this section is exactly what the nature of these differences comes to, their underlying rationale and how they are likely to impact on attitudes to broadcasting regulation.
Introduction
There is a generally shared agreement that the mass media can and do have the potential, at least, to have impact and influence at the social and individual levels. On this basis, regulatory structures have been created to control media content, especially broadcasting content. To produce and enact such legislation and set up necessary authorities, there has to be an underlying value-based structure and an associated set of beliefs about media content's potential impact and, equally important, media audiences' potential to be influenced in one or other ways. It is crucial, therefore, that we think about the values implicit in broadcasting regulation and the ends towards which it is directed. (See Philo 1990; McQuail 2000; Scannell 1989; and Seymore-Ure 1991.) Different assumptions about the underlying rationale of broadcasting clearly will entail substantive differences over the nature and scope of regulation. This is further underwritten by different presumptions concerning the purposes of broadcasting. It might be presumed that the primary function of the broadcasting media is to service people's proclaimed needs, providing news and information required to make decisions qua political citizen, and actual preferences, providing programmes that people desire to watch. Such a view is underwritten by the liberal presumption that the function of the state is to protect people's autonomy so they are free to pursue both their private and public lives as they choose provided no significant harm to others is involved. Conversely, the concept developed by John Reith, the first director of the BBC, held that the function of broadcasting should be to shape, influence and guide the culture of a society and the individuals constitutive of it in terms of cultivating the appropriate moral and social attitudes. For, the kind of public culture into which individuals are inducted, in part constituted and shaped by broadcasting, determines the kind of public and private commitments that are meaningful rather than nominal options for individuals within society. Thus, it is crucial to clarify what our actual evaluative commitments regarding broadcasting are, what they ought to be and what such considerations entail in terms of broadcasting practice and policy. Only in the light of some critical understanding of which values in broadcasting we should respect, or seek to cultivate, can we properly assess how good broadcasting in Britain really is and how it ought to be regulated.
Liberal Regulation
Standardly, liberals hold that the only point of the state is to honour and protect the autonomy of its citizens by ensuring certain basic freedoms, such as freedom from harm, and thus maintaining the minimum conditions of stability and tolerance required for people to be free to lead their lives as they choose. Laws and state regulation should be such that they are justifiable to all citizens who are subject to them. Society is conceived of as an association of self-determining individuals who contract together in order to enable each citizen to pursue autonomously their own particular ends or goals. (See Hobbes 1996 and Locke 1988.) In being treated as autonomous and rational creatures, individuals become citizens since they are the final arbiters of whether there is good reason to adhere to the State, its forms of regulation and the kind of justice it respects. (See Kant 1970.) Equally, this position carries within it the implicit contractual requirement laid upon the individual citizen to act in a 'civic' or citizen-like manner.
Hence, any of our particular substantive moral and social values should be distinguished from and not inform state governance and regulation. A state's laws and social policy should only be judged in terms of how well or badly they respect the autonomous interests and purposes of individuals. Thus, where a state attempts to prescribe how individuals ought to choose or behave it is acting illegitimately because it is attempting to circumscribe the freedom of its citizens rather than protect it. As John Rawls articulates it:
... the guiding idea is that the principles of justice for the basic structure of society are the object of the original agreement. They are the principles that free and rational persons concerned to further their own interests would accept in an initial position of equality as defining the fundamental terms of their association. These principles are to regulate all further agreements; they specify the kinds of social co-operation that can be entered into and the forms of government that can be established. This way of regarding the principles of justice I shall call justice as fairness. (Rawls 1972: 60)
Rawls argues that the first and most important principle of justice those in such an original position would arrive at is the principle that 'each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others'. (Rawls 1972: 60) The reason individual liberty, according to the liberal, ought to be given such priority has its roots in Kant and springs from recognizing the putatively universal value of individual liberty for human beings. What is of supreme importance, and what distinguishes us from mere animals, is our autonomy. Because we are self-conscious and can reflect upon what we do and why, our capacity for self-determination in choosing how we think and act is paramount. This is so, the liberal claims, no matter how diverse our conceptions of the good life might be.
This recognition of the voluntaristic element required to pursue a meaningful human life, the liberal claims, entails that the state is never justified in interfering with, supporting or suppressing any conceptions of the good life that people choose to pursue. So, far from cultivating and promoting a particular conception of the good, the liberal state should remain impartial about distinct conceptions of the good. The state should only seek to enshrine the basic rights and conditions required for people to be able to pursue their lives as they choose; anything else would be to abrogate the very value which underwrites the justification of the state in the first place.
It is important to note that the liberal is not claiming that self-determination is valuable merely because it happens to make us happy. Although many people would resent being deprived of their autonomy, some people might, superficially at least, be happier if they could just be told what to do and how to live. Rather, the liberal holds that exercising our autonomy is valuable for its own sake and only through the exercise of it do we realize our condition as rational beings:
The will is therefore not merely subject to the law, but is so subject that it must be considered as also making the law for itself and precisely on this account as first of all subject to the law (of which it can regard itself as the author). (Kant 1948: 93)
Hence, liberals prize our right to self-determination and the freedom to choose how we should live above and beyond anything else. It is also important to note that liberals are not, and need not be, moral sceptics as is often presumed:
It is not, as critics often maintain, that liberals elevate choice to the only absolute good: no liberal would applaud a life of crime merely because the criminal had chosen it. It is, however, true that most liberals have thought that the kind of autonomous individual they have admired can only become a fully autonomous being by exercising his or her powers of choice. Some people may strike lucky and find what suits them without very much exploration of alternatives; others may need to search much longer. But a person incapable of making a choice and sticking to it will have little chance of leading a happy life. (Ryan 1993: 304–5)
Hence, tolerance is one of the cardinal liberal virtues. Each individual should recognize that other people have a right to say or do what that individual might judge to be deeply mistaken. True tolerance should not be mistaken for indifference or, indeed, moral subjectivism. Tolerance involves judging that someone else has done wrong and putting up with it. One person may say or do what another judges to be deeply offensive or immoral. Nonetheless, we should recognize that, as autonomous beings, they have a right to do it.
Of course, liberals recognize that we all have not just political but social and moral interests. Amongst other things, that we have families and friends we care about and who care about us, that we have careers and can support ourselves financially, that we may value a religious life and so on. But it is not the job of the state to regulate for us in determining how we should protect and promote our interests. Rather, as autonomous individuals, we have a right to choose for ourselves how we think our interests may best be pursued. Thus, what we do is ultimately our responsibility, whether what we do is right or wrong.
The function of the state is not to promote the well-being of its citizens, but merely to maintain the conditions of stability, tolerance and free choice required for us to lead our lives as we choose. Hence, moral and social values, strictly speaking, have no business informing law, education or broadcasting regulation. The only justifiable state regulation is that required to maintain and protect the personal autonomy of its individual citizens. On such criteria any broadcasting or content regulation based on purely moral or social considerations would be precluded.
Recently there has been a new development in liberal thought, principally led by John Rawls, which is less ambitious. The more modest nature of political liberalism is that it does not presuppose a metaphysical conception of the nature and value of human beings as autonomous and rational agents. Rather it is motivated by the merely pragmatic, political problem that people living in the same society, but who possess different conceptions of the good, need to get along together to pursue their own lives and conceptions of the good. Thus, according to political liberalism:
Political power ... should be exercised, when constitutional essentials and basic questions of justice are at stake, only in ways that all citizens can reasonably be expected to endorse in the light of their common human reason. (Rawls 1993: 139–140)
Political liberalism, thus construed, is demanding. The basic rationale is outlined in terms of what all reasonable individuals would assent to, precisely because this kind of liberalism wants to allow for pluralism concerning the moral and social values people assent to. Yet, it is far from clear that all reasonable individuals will be able to agree, meaningfully, concerning their basic, core political values in this way.
Nonetheless, both the metaphysically ambitious and more modest political variants of liberalism hold that the mere immorality of a particular act or programme is clearly insufficient to warrant any legal or regulatory proscription against it. It is not the legitimate business of the state to regulate how we should lead our lives and thus what kinds of films and programmes we should watch. The state has no business interfering over the nature and content of what is broadcast as long as the programmes are legitimately provided and production of them does not involve harming people without their freely given, informed consent. If one chooses to spend much of their life on a diet of soap operas, anti-religious programming and hard-core sex films they may well be making a big mistake, but this is no one else's business but theirs. Someone may object to explicitly pornographic or violent films on the grounds that they are degrading and thereby deeply offensive or immoral. But, as long as people who would not choose to watch such programmes can avoid them, there can be no legitimate objection to such programmes being broadcast for those who do. (See Waldron 1993: 134–142.) Moreover, even if there are good reasons to believe that, for example, pornography and violent programmes may, indirectly, lead to harm to others, the liberal would not necessarily think there were sufficient grounds for prohibiting such programmes. After all, allowing pubs and bars to open on Friday nights, or allowing cars on the road, clearly leads, indirectly, to serious harm to others. But, such things are not prohibited precisely because that would constitute an abrogation of people's freedom to choose how to lead their lives and, as such, would constitute a deeply serious attack on their autonomy.
Nonetheless, despite the emphasis upon freedom, a liberal could and would accept a limited kind of broadcasting regulation. But the kind of regulation acceptable to the liberal is very limited in scope. For the liberal the state has no business guiding how we should lead our lives, and thus regulation is only justified where it maximizes autonomy. Hence, liberals are strongly against censorship because they are necessarily deeply antipathetic to regulation concerning the inherent content of programming. However, liberals would be keen to enforce regulation which ensured the fair operation of the media marketplace. For example, to avoid broadcasting monopolies from forming which might unfairly restrict viewers' choice. The point of such regulation is to protect and maximize viewer autonomy. Yet, a liberal might also accept that some positive broadcasting regulation concerning the content of programming may be required. However, this is not due to a concern with the content of programming as such, but only to protect and promote conditions of free choice. The purpose of such positive broadcasting regulation is to ensure that minority interests which are not served by the free operation of the marketplace, for example, small ethnic or cultural groups, are catered for. From this position, broadcasting regulation should not be concerned with what we ought to watch, rather it should be concerned to provide what it is that we want to watch. For the underlying rationale and justification of the state, on the liberal model, concerns our self-determination. Thus broadcasting regulation should only be concerned to protect and promote conditions of choice. What is chosen is each individual's own affair, as long as the same fundamental rights of others are respected.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Media & Values by David E. Morrison, Matthew Kieran, Michael Svennevig, Sarah Ventress. Copyright © 2007 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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