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. 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. Harms, rights and dignity 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. 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. Human dignity concerns have been central in criticisms of the decision to live-stream the US execution.
And the US Defense Department plans to live-stream the federal execution of Nidal Hassan, who killed 13 unarmed soldiers in a 2009 attack.
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”. Amnesty International’s Kyinzom Dhongdue noted: “Turning a state-sanctioned killing into a public spectacle only compounds the cruelty of the death penalty.”
