Abstract

Moral understanding is a distinctive cognitive good that has many facets. Noël Carroll’s idea of clarificationism helps show how screen stories can both clarify our moral knowledge and recalibrate our emotional responses. Moral understanding is an achievement that also consists in the capacity to know how to ask the right questions and, as Alison Hills argues, to know why in addition to knowing that something is true. Moral understanding has instrumental value in that it is often strongly connected to motivation for action. The influence of screen stories on moral understanding is likely to be “processional” or “cumulative,” developed over time and in relation to the development of one’s character.