ABSTRACT
Ethical systems derive from the central concerns of living things and have profound implications for life. Human beings tend to believe that they base their ethical systems on reason or religious doctrine. Were humans prone to live and interact in predominantly reasoned ways, ethical explorations based on logical arguments would suffice. The upheaval of thought manifested in postmodernism rearranged the ways of thinking about many ethical inquiries regarding such concepts as self, other, reality, truth, and representations. The most important point is that neither intuition nor conscious reason is sufficient to determine how to live and behave in the most ethical ways possible. Just as an ethical component can be found in just about any area of thought or action in life, a visual component can be found in just about anything—and an ethical component to anything visual. Visual ethics are the soul of communication, in the manner of the classic metaphor “the eyes are the windows to the soul.”
