ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the role of emotional engagement and moral evaluation. It suggests that the prevailing model of emotional engagement/moral evaluation—associated with theorists such as Noel Carroll, Carl Plantinga, should be supplemented by an account of emotional estrangement and moral-cognitive dissonance, and shows how these processes contribute to ethical experience by analysing a key scene from Michael Haneke's film, Amour. The idea of cinematic ethics can bring together the three important dimensions of the cinema-ethics relationship: ethical content in narrative cinema; the ethics of cinematic representation; and the ethics of cinema as symptomatic of broader cultural, ideological, and political concerns. Allegiance refers to 'the moral evaluation of characters by the spectator': the way that narrative, visual, and aural cues, which is to say particular aesthetic/cinematic techniques, grant to the character's state of mind, allow to understand the context of his or her actions, and thus to morally evaluate the character on the basis of this knowledge and understanding.
