Seems Like Someone's Rooting for the Wrong Side

[The Saucepan Man]

Originally Posted by Lal

If your life was ever threatened or that of someone close to you (and I sincerely hope it is not!) you may be driven to thinking about what you'd like to do to someone which may indeed involve killing them. I'm sure I don't have to spell out the kind of circumstance, you know what I mean! Of course few of those in such horrible circumstances ever act on their imaginations but nevertheless the potential is there in all of us. A difficult thing to acknowledge perhaps, but never say never until you are in their shoes...

I don’t deny that I might well experience those kinds of feelings in the situation that you describe, and I don‘t actually find it that difficult to acknowledge. It would, nevertheless represent a lapse from my own moral stance, however understandable, because I do not regard murdering someone in response to a crime that they have committed, whatever the crime, as morally acceptable. Nor do I regard torture as morally acceptable under any circumstances.

Just because a moral person may have a certain impulse, it does not make that impulse morally acceptable. Nor does having the immoral impulse make them an immoral person, particularly if they would never dream of acting on it.

Originally Posted by davem

Yes - because we recognise that person is a human being, not a literary creation.

Quite, and I was responding to your description of a hypothetical “real life” situation.

That said, I cannot, as I have said previously, agree that a reader’s response to a work of fiction cannot necessarily tell us anything about that reader. It depends what the work of fiction is. Your examples of Tom & Jerry and South Park are false analogies. One has to look at the context of the fictional world in which the events portrayed take place. Where violence takes place in a cartoon context, where it is understood by the viewer that its purpose is humour, that it is not intended to raise moral issues, and that no “real harm” ever comes to the protagonists, then I see no problem in that. But where evil, torture and suffering are portrayed in a world with a similar moral code to that of our own society and are portrayed as causing real harm in that fictional world, and where morality is necessarily implicated by the creation and portrayal of good beings and evil beings, then it seems to me that it does say something about the reader’s morality if they genuinely side with those who are portrayed as evil and who are responsible for the torture, murder and suffering, and regard those things as worthy (as opposed to simply finding them interesting, playing at sympathising with them, or admiring certain (admirable) qualities in them).

I note that you did not address my examples of 1984 and Silence of the Lambs. Would you draw no conclusions about a reader if they were genuinely to sympathise with the stated aims and actions of Big Brother and thought Winston Smith had it coming to him, or if they were genuinely to regard Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism as acceptable? If not, then we have no common ground here, because I most certainly would.