Lessons from Clint Eastwood on heroism and moral courage
Want to boost your moral wisdom? You’d be better off watching Netflix than reading essays by dead philosophers like Immanuel Kant. I can also recommend to watch films by Clint Eastwood.
In this talk, I use 40 years of Clint Eastwood’s film history to show how our ideas about good and evil have evolved. The characters Eastwood portrays on the big screen have undergone a massive moral transformation since the 1960s. Once a simple gunslinger with no name, Eastwood now depicts fallible characters with moral depth. Through film clips, I will explain the difference between a gunslinger and a moral hero. I will address questions like: Why are films like A Fistful of Dollars, Dirty Harry, Gran Torino, and Million Dollar Baby so popular? What does that say about the spirit of the times and our morality? Who are today’s bad guys? And what makes them bad?
The lecture is based on my book about the role stories play moral development. The book is written in Dutch. The subtitle reads as: why Netflix offers more Than Kant. In this book, I explain why stories, unlike philosophical texts, are a necessary ingredient for developing a moral sense. It all has to do with our brains. We are storytelling animals.
