Acting on Vulnerable Others: Ethical Agency in Media Discourse

Abstract

One valuable insight in Hannah Arendt’s definition of evil as banal lies in its articulation of action with judgement: without the capacity to reflect, action is dangerous — not simply amoral, devoid of ethical content, but an inherently immoral intervention on the world.¹ Drawing on Eichmann as a radical example of immoral action, Arendt favours a view of agency that thematizes the importance of reflexive engagement with the consequences of local practice as a pre-condition for public ethics. In this chapter, I draw on Arendt’s definition of agency in the context of an increasingly mediatized public realm, in order to investigate the extent to which the media, in confronting us with a number of moral dilemmas about our world, may also provide us with the resources of judgement that enable us to act reflexively on this world. To this end, I investigate the extent to which the television spectacles of human poverty and suffering, parading everyday on our screens, may offer us the resources to recognize these spectacles as causes worthy of our attention, emotion and even action — a concern with cosmopolitan forms of agency.²