The episode starts with a sudden great epiphany of the Prime Minister Michael Callow knowing about the kidnapping of one of the Royal family, a beloved known princess named Susannah, as a ransom, the kidnapper demand the PM of a very indecent sexual act, that is to have sex with a pig.

Before going more into the plot details which is still much interesting, a moral question has been just asked: if there a demand \(X\) that might cause the hurt \(Y\), however, it will has a terminus of goodness \(Z\) like saving the life of something of someone, or even some people, what action should be taken?

In the example of our PM \(Z\) is saving the life of the princess and \(Y\) would be traumatizing the PM (and also hurting the pig if animal rights are to be taken in this example). This question might have a harder version that would put the risk not on someone reputation but someone’s physical safety or life, for example, sacrificing one life for 10 people.

As of Callow understanding the demand and asserting his position while querying for his coworkers’, he states directly “I’m not fucking a pig, that’s not happening”. This form “I’m not fucking a pig” while said in the mere focus in Callow’s interest (saving himself), it abstracts the problem totally to what seems an indecent action “fucking a pig”, this sentence could be taken from any context and be still sound. It’s the same as “I’m not killing anybody”, “I’m not lying to my wife”.

This kind of abstracting the act to decide its rightness or wrongness —which is the view everyone in the show starts with— is called deontological ethics, which means that “the morality of an action should be based on whether that action itself is right or wrong under a series of rules and principles, rather than based on the consequences of the action”. So in traditional deontological ethics, we should not study the consequences of lying to someone, for example lying to a thief or a murderer, because lying should be always wrong. Contemporary deontological theorists like John Rawls thinks that in such cases we should have a “moral weight” to consider.

The moral weight of the demand is neglected initially in Callow’s statements and his interest in self-dignity is evident.

“I do not understand, why it is not on the news?” a commoner asks while watching the princess YouTube video, meanwhile in UKN, a popular national TV news agency, headquarter colleagues are discussing whether to voluntarily complain with the government media notice request not to broadcast this event, or to make the best of the capitalism of crisis and be the exclusive media provider and profit, “A woman’s life is at stake” what seem to be a team leader cries, however, he quickly gives up once he finds out that he would be the only one respecting his moral obligation, as he knows that many other news media are broadcasting it.

As mentioned, other philosophical views on moralities are presented throughout the episode and we will see how and which events affect the participants views on what happens, let’s quickly talk about one other ideology in advance; we have seen that traditional deontological ethics does not really care about the consequences of the event, unlike it, consequentialism suggests than the morality of any action merely depends on the consequences of that action. Utilitarianism is considered to be one of the consequentialism theories thatprescribe actions that maximize happiness and well-being for all affected individuals and take the action that will maximize the goodness, so we should take the life of princess Susannah, the effect of her death on the society, the effect of having the sexual intercourse on Callow’s family and reputation.

The identifiable victim effect is the tendency of individuals to offer greater aid when a specific, identifiable person (“victim”) is observed under hardship, as compared to a large, vaguely defined group with the same need [2].

The identifiable victim effect (IVE henceforward) is a commonly used filter in everyday media, whether intentional or unintentionally. A current example of it is in the ongoing war on Gaza that caused so far the death of more than 10,000 children in Gaza, however, lots of media campaigns were about the kidnapped teenagers and children, who were about 10 to 50. People do not really put weight on the 50 Israeli kids more than they would put on 10,000 Arab child (hopefully), but humans intuitively would put their attention on something that is constantly streamed into their views, and much more identifiable.

This is used commonly on media, take cancer charities for example, most of the time they advertise for a single story that might sound the most touching one for viewers instead of presenting the fact that they have so many other cases, some of them might be even more critical but it would be either less effective for them to market, or it might be disrupting to show them on advertisement.

Noam Chomsky in his Propaganda Model introduced the concept of worthy and unworthy victims. In [3], Chomsky used the case of the murder of Jerzy Popieluszko in Poland (which had a very extensive and wide media coverage) versus the murder of hundred religious participants in Latin America.

In nutshell, people will show general inclination for things that they had more inputs about, things that the media can make it experience, you can discuss the sadness of a victim family for their lose, and that of his friends extensively more than you can do with many others, and more than you can do with any other story that you media may suppress.

As the public think initially of the demand, all of them are deontologists: “I do not think anyone should concede to any humiliation under threat” a commoner explains on TV followed by other agreeing participants, a poll has shown that the majority of the public indeed thinks that he should not take the action.

However, very surprisingly the public views shifts extremely once the media broadcasts an experience of the princess suffering, a video showing her finger getting cut. 86% of them gain a consensus on Callow should actually do the pig thing. The viewers now are consequentialists, although their view of the utility is not completely accurate.

Note that the public were aware of the princess death if Callow decide to preserve his dignity, yet they were only touched when they were able to see a view, an experience, of the princess suffering; if a graphic emulated media was broadcasted instead about the slaughter of the princess it would have the same effect on the media.

The most thing I find very interesting about the episode is how everyone of the viewers were interested in thriller storytelling of what will the PM do, what I described earlier as subliminal messaging, ignoring all the moral, philosophical and intellectual questioning of the event and its recipients, and by “everyone” I mean both the NPCs in the show and us, the observers.

I personally believe that this was a very interesting symbolization in the first gate into black mirror, akin to a national anthem reciting: while everyone is concentrated, a much more bigger interest was happening in the same scene: in Blcak Mirror case, that’s freeing the princess, for the observer, it is ignoring everything but the main story of the PM and Susannah.

This style is very common especially in the first season, as we are going to see in the next episode and next article, the whole episode 2 of season 1 is about nothing but the show itself.