From Relativism to Expressivism

This chapter begins with a relativist challenge: it is not clear that every philosophical tradition recognizes a clear distinction between aesthetics and morality. The chapter includes a discussion of ancient Greek, classical Chinese, and Yoruban conceptions of the relationship between moral and aesthetic judgment, as well as some familiar relativist arguments. Then it develops Alain Locke’s response to the relativist challenge: an expressivist account of different modes of valuing. Finally, the chapter draws on Wang Yangming to make an argument about the link between feeling and value. The chapter concludes that expressivism explains the variation in value at least as well as relativism does.

Wicked Artists

This chapter takes up the problem of immoral artists, as well as related questions, like immoral production. When an artist commits great crimes, some are tempted to treat the art itself as though it were also tainted. The question is whether this is the right thing to do. This chapter argues that the question can be approached in two ways. First, the chapter considers the possibility that works by bad artists are in themselves morally bad. It argues that this view is plausible in only a small number of cases. Second, the chapter considers the possibility that communities around bad artists are tainted by the artist’s bad actions. It defends this view against objections. The primary conclusion is that we should not, for the most part, think of works themselves as being moral or immoral because their creators are.

Introduction

This book takes up the problems that we run into when we judge works of art to be morally good or bad. This might seem like an unserious thing to do. In public discourse, such judgments are often born of prejudice or are mere devices for political scapegoating. For example, former senator Jesse Helms’s attacks on the alleged immorality of Mapplethorpe’s photography seem to have been grounded in his hatred and fear of gays and lesbians; leaders of the National Rifle Association routinely raise moral concerns about violent video games as means to distract people and to undermine public support for gun control. We ought not to take such moral judgments very seriously....

Conclusions and Illustrations

This chapter applies the approaches defended in the book to some cases of moral criticism of art. The first part considers some cases of criticisms of entire kinds of art: criticisms of horror films, bell hooks’s criticisms of the representations of black women in popular media, and Paul Taylor’s critique of “narratives of moral representation.” Second, it considers criticisms of two specific works: Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Spike Lee’s film BlacKkKlansman. It concludes by revisiting the arguments of Chapter 1. The conclusion is that judging art morally is no easy matter, and it might not always be clear whether or not a work is good, but that there is value in thinking through these matters.

Artworks and Persons

This short chapter recapitulates the main conclusions of the previous chapters. The preceding chapters taken together support a moderate skepticism with regard to how we evaluate art morally. Artworks in themselves are rarely appropriate objects of moral evaluation. We should not judge artworks as though they were people. Art might sometimes affect us—either our character or our understanding—but these effects can be hard to see, and they can be good or bad. Our engagement with art can also affect our relationships with others in our affective communities, and these effects can matter too. However, the arguments thus far doesn’t tell us much about what these moral evaluations of art come to or how they matter. The second part of the book, which starts in Chapter 6, takes up these larger questions.

Should Moral Judgments Affect Aesthetic Judgments (or the Other Way Around)?

This chapter offers a defense of autonomism—the view that aesthetic and moral judgments are independent of one another. When we ask whether judging an artwork to be morally bad affects its aesthetic value, we are asking a normative question about what it is best for us to do. Should we take a moral judgment about the effects of an artwork to bear on our aesthetic judgment about the work itself? The chapter argues that we do not make any error if we refuse to change one judgment in light of the other. We are free to keep them separate. This chapter concludes with replies to objections from both those who endorse a stronger link between morality and aesthetics as well as those who want a complete separation.

An Expressivist Account of the Differences between Aesthetic and Moral Judgments

This chapter begins with five more or less familiar ways of distinguishing between aesthetic and moral judgments. These distinctions are far from perfect—they allow of exceptions—but they constitute a reasonable guide. Then the chapter introduces two new distinctions from an expressivist framework. The first is the fact that aesthetic reasoning, but not moral reasoning, involves a particular kind of non-valenced judgment. The second is that aesthetic judgments, but not moral judgments, are recalcitrant in the face of conflicting higher-order judgments. The chapter concludes that expressivism offers a reasonably clear basis for distinguishing between moral and aesthetic judgments.

Does Art Change Us?

This chapter takes up the question of art’s effects on its audience. The thesis is that art probably does affect us in ways that matter morally, and so we should be suspicious of accounts that treat art’s effects as unimportant. The chapter has two main parts. First, it sets out a prima facie case for the claim that artworks might change their audiences in morally salient ways. Drawing on social science research, this section establishes that there is a plausible mechanism and supporting background evidence to suggest that we might well be affected by the art we enjoy: made more aggressive, for example, by narratives centered around violent protagonists. The second part argues that the principal approaches to judging art morally without talking about art’s effects suffer from significant weaknesses.

Morality and Art

This chapter sets out the main questions to be explored more fully in the chapters to follow. It does this by studying three well-known debates about morality and art: from classical China, the debate between Mozi and Xunzi about the value of music; from ancient Greece, the difference between Plato and Aristotle over poetry; and from the Harlem Renaissance, the argument between W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain LeRoy Locke over the value of art as propaganda. The chapter concludes by showing that the problem of morality and art has three main parts: the morality of the artist; the effects of art on the audience; and the relationship between art and moral knowledge. The chapter also serves to set out some arguments and positions that are made use of later in the book.

Art and Moral Understanding

This chapter takes up the question of whether we might gain moral knowledge from art. The first section takes up arguments in favor of the cognitive benefits of art. It concludes that the case for art’s cognitive benefits is at best unproven. The second section takes up the question of whether trying to gain moral understanding is the best way to engage with art. It argues that it is more fruitful to think of artworks as offering us moral themes to consider than as offering us moral claims to believe. The chapter then turns to a variety of non-propositional approaches, as well as the possibility that art corrupts or degrades our moral understanding, and it argues that the case for this depressing conclusion is at least as strong as the case for thinking that art enriches moral understanding. The upshot is that the case for moral learning from art is weak.