Perth, It has never been easier for us to access images of people being harmed, maimed and killed. Two recent cases have focused on very different, prominent stories of sharing graphic footage of deaths.
Footage has been widely shared of a UK man mauled to death by a tiger after he entered its enclosure in a Yorkshire wildlife park. And the US Defense Department plans to live-stream the federal execution of Nidal Hassan, who killed 13 unarmed soldiers in a 2009 attack.
We often see news footage of natural disasters such as the floods in Nepal too, with terrible images of people running to almost certain death.
Some argue tech platforms and news media have a responsibly not to share such footage. What about individuals? Do we have a responsibility not to share or watch such footage?
In a statement about the tiger death, UK police asked people not to share the footage of videos circulating online. Despite this, the video is watchable on some news sites and it has been widely shared on social media, such as Facebook.
Of the proposed live stream in the US, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said: “People need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things”. But the UN human rights office has said live-streaming would be “tantamount to a public execution and would breach the absolute prohibition of torture”.
There are two main sets of ethical issues with broadcasting such material. The first is about harms. The second is about dignity. They apply to both networks and platforms, and to us as individuals.
Harms, rights and dignity
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Harms from viewing graphic and violent content are well documented. Content moderators who view and filter graphic footage from social media have high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder . Children who are exposed to graphic footage online experience harms ranging from emotional upset to increases in aggressive behaviour.
Indirect harms can come from watching such footage, too. Treating footage of violent deaths as spectacle undermines traits such as compassion, which ethicists who emphasise the importance of virtue, such as Aristotle, believe are required for us to flourish.
What about those people featured in such footage? Viewing or sharing graphic footage of a person’s death would almost certainly violate their privacy and undermine their dignity.
Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, famous as the founder of our rights-based thinking about ethics, argued humans have an intrinsic worth and dignity. Ethicists who follow Kant would argue that using a person’s death as public spectacle violates their rights and dignity by using them as a means to an end.
Even viewing the footage out of morbid curiosity disregards the person’s right to privacy, or disregards their likely wishes not to have that footage shared.
Human dignity concerns have been central in criticisms of the decision to live-stream the US execution. Amnesty International’s Kyinzom Dhongdue noted: “Turning a state-sanctioned killing into a public spectacle only compounds the cruelty of the death penalty.”
There is also the element of dignity as it relates to the rest of us. We all have a stake in living in societies where human dignity is valued. It’s telling that politicians as diverse as One Nation’s Barnaby Joyce and The Greens’ Sarah Hanson-Young both condemn the plans to live-stream the execution, on these grounds.
Are there reasons to watch?
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Might there be some reasons that make it permissible – or even good – to watch such footage? I think there are, in some circumstances.
First, we might feel an obligation to bear witness. This seems to have been the motivation when news media shared images of the survivors of concentration camps at the end of the second world war. In many such cases, we also have a sense of wanting to attend to these horrors to prevent them happening again.
Neither of these motives seems to apply in the case of the tiger incident or public execution – though it may justify showing footage of the recent floods in Nepal, in which people were swept away.
Second, we may feel that when the state carries out an execution or other unpleasant action, they do so in our name, or as our elected representatives. We often have legitimate interest in transparency and oversight.
Those considerations certainly don’t seem to apply to the tiger footage. Even in the execution case, it at most requires some witnesses, not live-streaming.
The third reason in favour of viewing such footage is that it might prevent future crimes by others. While this obviously does not apply in the tiger or Nepal cases, it might in the case of the execution. Certainly, it seems to be Hegseth’s argument. The evidence for this is scant, though.
Increasingly, in this high-tech world, where platforms are often lightly regulated, the impetus will be on us to make these decisions. We have less individual power than tech platforms, but our individual choices can add up to a lot of harm done to ourselves and others.
We should pause and think about what we would want, if our deaths were being filmed and our dignity or privacy were at stake. We should also think about what it does to us to watch such footage. AMS
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.