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This chapter surveys a breadth of approaches to the ethics of film and other narrative media, both contemporary and historic, and positions them in relation to developments in cognitive media ethics. These include cine-ethics and film philosophy, phenomenological approaches, literary ethics and hermeneutics, notions of aesthetic autonomy, and ethics in narratology. The contributions and challenges of each approach are summarized, as are their uses in the development of a normative ethics for cognitive media studies. Throughout this chapter, a case emerges for the complementary, elaborative rigors of cognitive science, normative ethics, and consequentialism. The chapter concludes by indicating how methods for analysis developed at the center of these areas of study will inform the remainder of the book.

Iris Murdoch worked in the UNRRA camps, and her early novels are crowded with exiles, refugees and displaced persons. It is suggested that Murdoch's early writings are an attempt to grasp the elusive figure that appears inbetween the withdrawal and the granting of rights: the refugee or displaced person, or, as Murdoch would probably put it, the human individual. The refugee in Murdoch's writing becomes not only a limit concept of political, juridical and speaking life, but of fiction too, and of the very possibility of a moral novel-writing. This chapter turns its attention to literary ethics in Murdoch through The Flight from the Enchanter. Where Murdoch's love ultimately depends on the unpredictable hazards of the liberal self, Franz Baermann Steiner's ethics are those of the ritual and taboo that were his subjects of study and his grounds for belief.

Chapter three reveals the paradigm shift in Robinson’s theorization of literature that his ‘conversion’ from the empiricism of Locke, Hume, and Godwin to Kant’s critical philosophy prompted. Yet Kant’s notion of aesthetic autonomy – of art’s detachment from the motives of the mind and the causality governing the laws of nature – occasioned an impasse in Robinson’s conceptualization of literature’s ethical relevance. He resolved this in an ingenious move by skilfully locating in Kant’s critical philosophy, and then developing, an analogy between art and morals: the self-contained structure and dynamic of a work of literature find their corresponding parameters in the reader’s mind, in her or his moral compass. On the basis of this analogy, chapter three argues, Robinson conducted his own ‘ethical turn’ away from notions of absolute aesthetic autonomy, and developed the ground-breaking critical principle of ‘Free Moral Discourse’ (Hunnekuhl) that from here onwards underpinned his literary activities. Against the backdrop of various unpublished manuscripts, this chapter discusses Robinson’s articles on Hume and causality, and on Moses Mendelssohn and the Pantheism Controversy, in the Monthly Magazine (1799–1801), as well as his letters ‘On the Philosophy of Kant’ in the Monthly Register and Encyclopaedian Magazine (1802–03).

Chapter four focuses on Robinson’s five-letter series on German literature, in particular Goethe and Schiller, in the Monthly Register and Encyclopaedian Magazine (1802–03) that accompanied his transmissions of Kantianism to England, as well as his articles on Lessing in the Unitarian Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature (1806). Read against the backdrop of Robinson’s explications of Kant and informal discussion of August Wilhelm Schlegel, all of these writings emerge as erudite, autonomous attempts at resolving the impasse between aesthetic autonomy and literature’s moral relevance detailed in the preceding chapter. These attempts are further characterized by an experimental oscillation between Kantian and post-Kantian approaches to art, and demonstrate that Robinson was increasingly regarding literary form as those universal parameters that may facilitate moral discourse across national, cultural, and historical gulfs. The letters on German literature, and afterwards the appreciation of the ‘free-thinking spirit and love of humanity’ (Diana Behler) in Lessing’s cosmopolitanism, hence enabled Robinson to establish in terms of practical criticism his ‘ethical turn’ away from notions of full aesthetic autonomy and towards his critical principle of ‘Free Moral Discourse’.

Chapter six aims to elucidate the decisive overall agreement, as well as the subtle nuances, that Robinson discerned in the works of Herder, Wordsworth, and Blake, and according to which he disseminated them, both among these poets and wider audiences in England and Germany. Robinson found these three poets to be advancing idiosyncratic forms of aesthetic free play that kindle the moral imagination of their readers. The chapter reads Robinson’s three articles on Herder in the Unitarian Monthly Repository (1808–09) and his German article on Blake in Friedrich Perthes’s Vaterländisches Museum (1811) against the informal critiques of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads that Robinson elaborated in a series of letters in late 1802. These critiques are so ground-breaking since they constitute a profound, autonomous development of Kantian and post-Kantian notions of aesthetic autonomy into a distinctive conceptualization of literature’s cross-cultural ethical relevance, and thus provide the clearest definition of Robinson’s critical principle of ‘Free Moral Discourse’. According to this principle, art has a bearing on morality through their shared aspiration to disinterestedness, while the ultimate unattainability of such reciprocal disinterestedness creates a dynamic interplay between its two constituents.

The conclusion discusses the ways in which Robinson’s comparative literary criticism pervades his main diary, which he began in January 1811 – upon completing his translation of Amathonte – and continued until days before his death in 1867. He here elaborates the same ethical responsibility that distinguishes his work as a ‘literator’ or comparatist, and transfers to the keeping of his diary the duty of the critical disseminator of literature to bridge and unite. A strong sense of the cross-pollination between the social and the literary thus pervades Robinson’s diary-keeping ‘experiment’, as he emerges more of the Wordsworth than the Boswell of his chosen field that is comparative literature. The conclusion further discusses this claim in relation to the critical commentary on William Taylor’s translation of Sacontalá (1789), Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812), and George Henry Lewes’s Life of Goethe (1855) that Robinson committed to his diary. It also provides select examples from the wealth of hitherto unknown comparative criticism that may yet be found in Robinson’s main diary, and raises questions as to his influence on Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey which future scholarship may wish to address.