Philosophy 375PF - Dangerous Movies

Many critics considered Kathyrn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty to be the best film of 2012, but it was also widely criticized for seeming to promote torture. Movies can be morally dangerous, seemingly endorsing or even promoting immoral or discriminatory ideals, or romanticizing immoral characters and behavior, as in Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs (Thomas Harris, 1991). In this course, we evaluate the arguments given for treating certain movies as immoral, and we examine whether and how our moral evaluations of movies should affect us. When, if ever, are movies immoral? Should certain movies be censored? Should we withhold praise from morally objectionable movies?