Photography and Ethics

An exploration of some issues relating to photography, ethics and my own practice.

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"[Ethics] is not concerned at all with what public opinion or moral matters actually happen to be, just as the scientist is not concerned with what people believe about the shape of the earth but with its actual shape"

Jones, Sontag, Beckner & Fogelin. Approaches to Ethics 1969 p8.

I have a bit of a problem with this quotation.

So... it doesn't matter if public opinion rails against taking candid photographs of other people's children, just as long as it is morally right to do so? The obvious question here is, who decides what is right then, if not 'the public'? Is there an intrinsic 'right and wrong' which overrides any transitory set of values? Surely, moral values are merely human constructs, whereas the shape of the earth is a measurable, quantifiable fact. Probably. I cannot yet understand how there can be a categorical imperative regarding ethics which has not been constructed by man in the first place. We all like to think that we know right from wrong, but on what have we based these standpoints if not on opinion, albeit ancient, lost-in-the-mists-of-time opinion?

William Graham Sumner (1840-1910), one of the founding modern sociologists and defender of Cultural Relativism, argued that all rights and wrongs are based on the instinct to survive and therefore that such mores are inextricably bound to a given culture:

"The morals of an age are never anything but the consonance between what is done and what the mores of the age require... Every attempt to win an outside standpoint from which to reduce the whole to an absolute philosophy of truth and right... is a delusion. New elements are brought in only by new conquests of nature through science and art. The new conquests change the conditions of life and the interests of the members of the society. Then the mores change by adaptation to new conditions and interests. The philosophy and ethics then follow to account for and justify the changes in the mores..."

Relating this argument to photography ethics, it would seem that whether or not it is 'right' to take a photograph in any given set of circumstances depends entirely on the cultural climate of the day.

This would have been a totally alien concept to St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who believed that 'natural laws' determine the moral structure of the world; these natural laws coming from the Christian God.

Is it the case, then, that there are moral standpoints which, regardless of any individual person's core values are in fact intrinsically right, or wrong? Categorical imperatives which are not open to discussion? And if so, (putting aside for a moment the intriguing question of who or what decided what these imperatives were to be) how can they be applied to street photography, photojournalism, reportage and, indeed, family snaps?

References

Jones, Sontag, Beckner & Fogelin. Approaches to Ethics 1969

Sumner, WG. Folkways. Ginn & Co New York 1907. Quotation sourced in: Rachels, J (Ed.) The Right Thing To Do - Basic Readings in Moral Philosophy (3rd.Ed.) McGraw Hill New York 2003.

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