Reality TV presents plenty of moral dilemmas

Drunk girls break a window to get into a locked house. A man lies about his grandmother's death to earn sympathy in a game. A contestant says she wants to stab another contestant in the face. A woman drives drunk as cameras keep rolling — and viewers keep watching.

Viewers tuning in to some reality TV situations may come to the conclusion that there simply isn't such a thing as moral behavior on reality TV. It may depend on how you define "morality." And some who work behind the scenes say that unscripted television shows can actually teach viewers about what's right or wrong.

“Survivor,” which just concluded its 18th season, has no rules prohibiting lying, betrayal, cruelty.

“The ethical line on ‘Survivor’ is a continuum,” said host and producer Jeff Probst. “Moral is at one end, immoral at the other. Each person decides at any given moment where they are willing to place themselves — how far down that continuum will you drift for a million dollars?”

That's the question on most competitive reality shows, and provides many of their most compelling moments.

“One of the most fascinating aspects of Survivor is watching people justify their ethics,” Probst said. "Nothing is off-limits when it comes to crossing an ethical line. It comes down to your own personal ethics and how far you can stretch that line in your own self.”

Probst wouldn't identify the most or least moral or ethical players the game has seen over its 17 seasons, saying “that's impossible to answer because it requires a judgment regarding what is moral in a game that requires each player to make that decision for themselves.” Often, it's a decision other players, viewers, and critics make.

Probst did say that Jon “Jonny Fairplay” Dalton's seventh-season lie “that his grandmother had passed away is one of the most blatant examples of questionable moral behavior. It was brilliant from a strategy (point-of-view) and horrifying on a basic human level.”

But is it truly immoral behavior? Maybe not.

10 rules of moral behavior
Bernard Gert, Dartmouth's Stone Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy, is the author of “Common Morality,” which presents a rule-based framework for understanding moral behavior, rules that he said are shared across cultures and societies.

The first five rules are “don't kill, don't cause pain, don't disable, don't cause loss of freedom, don't deprive of pleasure,” Gert said. The second five are “more social.” Those are “don't deceive, keep your promises, don't cheat, obey the law, and do your duty” as required by your job or role.

Quiz What would you do? Is it OK to kill a serial killer? Lie for $1 million? Turn in your own son? Puzzle over these 10 moral issues from recent television shows.

It's those second five that come up in games such as “Survivor,” “Big Brother,” “Hell's Kitchen,” or even “The Biggest Loser.”  But the rules don't necessary apply to questionable behavior on series that center on dating or drinking, such as “Flavor of Love” and “The Real World.”

"There's an amazing amount of confusion about sexual behavior. People often think about morality as if it's related to sex. Sex is no more a moral matter than eating is,” Gert said. “It just turns out that sexual behavior really has the potential for hurting people.” Rape and “certain kinds of seduction,” he said, are clearly immoral, but only “because (they violate) one of the other rules.”

So sexual interaction between consenting adults on a cable reality series, whether it's hook-ups in a hot tub or experimentation, isn't necessarily immoral. Viewers may judge it as such, however, particularly if the actions violate religious standards. But Gert said that conflating morality and religion is a mistake.

“If it's the case that morality has to be universal, it can't be the case that morality depends upon religion, because there's no religion that's universal,” he said.

Instead, only when behavior affects others, such as when reality show contestants get into alcohol-fueled physical altercations, would it be immoral, according to Gert's framework.

Those kinds of fights are frequently a part of “The Bad Girls Club,” an Oxygen reality series. Executive producer Jonathan Murray, who co-created MTV's “The Real World” with Mary-Ellis Bunim in the early 1990s, said “Bad Girls” was developed because “some of our most fascinating characters were the bad girls on (other) shows.”

The result is a lot of drinking, fighting, and screaming that broke ratings records for Oxygen when the third season premiered recently. During the premiere, the cast was dropped off at the house, which was locked; producers supplied alcohol but no key.

“We locked them out because we knew a bad girl wouldn't let herself stay locked out,” he said. “She's not hurting anyone by (breaking in), other than the window.”

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