Visual ethics is an emerging interdisciplinary field of scholarship that brings together religious studies, philosophy, photo and video journalism, visual arts, and cognitive science

Cognitive science

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...

 in order to explore the ways human beings relate to others ethically through visual perception. Historically, the field of ethics

Ethics

Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc.Major branches of ethics include:...

 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

Visual culture

Visual Culture as an academic subject is a field of study that generally includes some combination of cultural studies, art history, critical theory, philosophy, and anthropology, by focusing on aspects of culture that rely on visual images.- Overview :...

 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 is always depends on the cultural background.

Visual Ethics Symposium

In April 2007, under the direction of Timothy Beal

Timothy Beal

Timothy K. Beal is a writer and scholar in the field of religious studies whose work explores matters of religion and American culture, past and present. He is currently Florence Harkness Professor of Religion at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, USA.- Biography :Beal was born in...

 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

Case Western Reserve University is a private research university located in Cleveland, Ohio, USA...

 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 Butler
  Judith Butler is an American post-structuralist philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley.Butler received her Ph.D...
  
   (2004). Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso.
• Antonio R. Damasio (1994). Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. New York: Grosset/Putnam.
• Mark Johnson
  Mark Johnson (professor)
  Mark L. Johnson is Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. He is well-known for contributions to embodied philosophy, cognitive science and cognitive linguistics, some of which he has coauthored with George Lakoff such as...
  
   (1993). Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Emmanuel Levinas
  Emmanuel Lévinas
  Emmanuel Levinas was a Lithuanian-born French Jewish philosopher and Talmudic commentator.-Life:Emanuelis Levinas received a traditional Jewish education in Lithuania...
  
  . 1969. Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
• W.J.T. Mitchell (2006). What Do Pictures Want? Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Kaja Silverman
  Kaja Silverman
  Kaja Silverman is an American film theorist and art historian. She received her Ph.D. in English from Brown University. She taught at Yale University, Trinity College, Simon Fraser University, Brown University, the University of Rochester and the University of California, Berkeley, before joining...
  
   (1995). Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge.
• Susan Sontag
  Susan Sontag
  Susan Sontag was an American author, literary theorist, feminist and political activist whose works include On Photography and Against Interpretation.-Life:...
  
   (1973). On Photography. New York: Picador.
• Susan Sontag
  Susan Sontag
  Susan Sontag was an American author, literary theorist, feminist and political activist whose works include On Photography and Against Interpretation.-Life:...
  
  (2004). Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Penguin.

External links

• A Question of Truth: Photojournalism and Visual Ethics by Donald R. Winslow
• "Hospitable Vision: Some Notes on the Ethics of Seeing Film" by Margaret Miles and S. Brent Plate