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Names: Harold, James (James Edward), editor.
Title: The Oxford handbook of ethics and art / James Harold. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023014257 (print) | LCCN 2023014258 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197539798 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197539811 (epub) | ISBN 9780197539828
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023014257
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DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197539798.001.0001
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1. Introduction
James Harold
I. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
Eric L. Hutton
3. Ancient Greek Philosophers on Art and Ethics: How Can Immoral Art Be Ethically Beneficial?
Pierre Destrée
Oliver Leaman
Yuriko Saito
Timothy
M. Costelloe
7. The Knowledge That Joins Ethics to Art in Yorùbá Culture
Barry Hallen
8. Art and Ethics in India in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Nalini Bhushan and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
9. Art and Ethics: Formalism
Michalle Gal
10. Harlem Renaissance: An Interpretation of Racialized Art and Ethics
Jacoby Adeshi Carter and Sheena Michele Mason
11. Evolution of Art and Moral Concerns in New China: From Mao Zedong’s Yenan Talks to Xi Jinping’s Speech on Artistic Practice
Eva Kit Wah Man
II. THEORETICAL APPROACHES
12. Meta-Ethics and Meta-Aesthetics
Alex King
13.
Moonyoung Song
14. Relativism
Ted Nannicelli
15. Kantian Approaches to Ethical Judgment of Artworks
Sandra Shapshay
16. Consequentialist Approaches to Ethical Judgment of Artworks
Scott Woodcock
Nancy E. Snow
III. ETHICAL ISSUES IN INDIVIDUAL ARTS
PROBLEMS IN
36. Group Agency, Alienation, and Public Art 578
Mary Beth Willard
37. Immoral Artists 593
Erich Hatala Matthes
38. Cultural Appropriation 609
C. Thi Nguyen and Matthew Strohl
39. Forgery 627
Darren Hudson Hick
40. Art, Ethics, and Vandalism 643
Sondra Bacharach
41. Censorship and Selective Support for the Arts 660
Brian Soucek
42. Art, Race, and Racism 675
Adriana Clavel-Vázquez
43. Representation, Identity, and Ethics in Art 693
Paul C. Taylor
44. Ethics and Imagination 709
Joy Shim and Shen-yi Liao
45. Moral Learning from Art
Eileen John
Acknowledgments
Editing this volume has been a group effort from the very beginning.
First of all, I want to thank Lucy Randall for inviting me to submit a proposal to edit this volume, and for guiding me for more than two years through the process of revising the proposal, contacting authors, making changes, and so on. Thanks are also owed to the anonymous reviewers whose detailed and helpful feedback led me to substantially revise and expand the topics covered and the contributors invited. I am grateful to Paloma Escovedo and Lauralee Yearly at Oxford University Press for all of their editorial expertise, and for seeing the volume through each stage of production.
I am deeply grateful to all of the authors for their carefully researched, exciting, and insightful chapters. The process of reading drafts of these chapters has been deeply rewarding. I cannot overstate how much I have learned from reading their contributions. I also need to thank all of the authors for being so patient throughout this process, and for their capacity to forgive my mistakes along the way.
Nils Hennes-Stear has been a great help to me during the process of putting this together. When I was stuck puzzling out some questions about whom to ask to write what, he listened well, provided wise advice, and offered to help in all kinds of ways. (He also wrote a terrific chapter.)
Laura Sizer took the time to read through my introduction and to offer helpful feedback. I am extremely grateful for her time and effort, and I believe that the final product is better as a result of her input.
I need to thank Mount Holyoke College, which has supported this project by funding a student assistant, Sabryna Coppola, to aid me in every stage of editing.
Most important, I want to thank Sabryna Coppola, the student who has served as my unofficial assistant editor. (I deeply regret that it is not possible to give them this title officially.) For more than six months, Sabryna worked diligently on this project. They read every chapter draft very carefully, making minor corrections, attending to details of reference formatting, and offering other insights and suggestions. Sabryna created and maintained a master spreadsheet, tracking chapter submissions, abstracts, keywords, and word counts. They were constantly reminding me what needed to be done, and half the time, they simply did it themselves. I have been told that it is not worth employing undergraduate students as research assistants, but Sabryna has proved this to be completely false. Their contributions have been essential.
And, as always, I am grateful to my family for supporting me patiently through every stage of this project.
Contributors
Sondra Bacharach is associate professor of philosophy at Victoria University of Wellington.
Christopher Bartel is professor of philosophy at Appalachian State University and adjunct research fellow at Charles Sturt University.
Nalini Bhushan is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and professor of philosophy at Smith College.
Jeanette Bicknell is an independent scholar in Toronto, Canada.
Paul Butterfield is assistant professor of philosophy at Alfred University.
Noël Carroll is Distinguished Professor of philosophy and film studies at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Jacoby Adeshi Carter is associate professor of philosophy at Howard University.
Adriana Clavel-Vázquez is assistant professor of philosophy at Tilburg University.
Timothy M. Costelloe is professor of philosophy at the College of William & Mary.
Anthony Cross is assistant professor of philosophy at Texas State University.
Pierre Destrée is associate research fellow at the Fonds National belge de la Recherche Scientifique and associate professor at the Université catholique de Louvain.
A. W. Eaton is professor of philosophy and associate dean for faculty affairs and interdisciplinary programs at University of Illinois, Chicago.
Saul Fisher is associate provost for research, grants, and academic initiatives and associate professor of philosophy at Mercy College.
Michalle Gal is professor of philosophy at Shenkar College of Engineering, Design, and Art.
Karen Gover is a law student at Harvard Law School.
Barry Hallen is the director of Southern Crossroads Academic in Sarasota, Florida.
James R. Hamilton is professor of philosophy emeritus at Kansas State University.
James Harold is professor of philosophy at Mount Holyoke College.
Darren Hudson Hick is assistant professor of philosophy at Furman University.
Kathleen Higgins is professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin.
Eric L. Hutton is professor of philosophy at the University of Utah.
Daniel Jacobson is Bruce D. Benson Professor of Philosophy and director of the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Eileen John is professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick.
Jennifer Judkins is adjunct professor of music (retired) at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Alex King is associate professor of philosophy at Simon Fraser University.
Carolyn Korsmeyer is research professor of philosophy at the University at Buffalo.
Peter Lamarque is professor of philosophy at the University of York.
Oliver Leaman is professor of philosophy at the University of Kentucky.
Shen-yi Liao is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Puget Sound.
Eva Kit Wah Man is Kiriyama Professor at the University of San Francisco and professor emeritus at Hong Kong Baptist University.
Sheena Michele Mason is assistant professor of English at SUNY Oneonta.
Erich Hatala Matthes is associate professor of philosophy and director of the Camilla Chandler Frost ’47 Center for the Environment at Wellesley College.
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is professor of English (retired) at the University of Allahabad.
Amy Mullin is professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto.
Ted Nannicelli is associate professor in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland.
C. Thi Nguyen is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah.
Carl Plantinga is professor of film and media at Calvin University.
Becca Rothfeld is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Harvard University.
Yuriko Saito is professor of philosophy emerita at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Elisabeth Schellekens is chair professor of aesthetics at Uppsala University.
Sandra Shapshay is professor of philosophy at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Joy Shim is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Princeton University.
Nancy E. Snow is professor of philosophy at the University of Kansas.
Moonyoung Song is assistant professor of philosophy at the National University of Singapore.
Brian Soucek is professor of law and Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California, Davis.
Nils-Hennes Stear is associate lecturer at Uppsala University.
Matthew Strohl is professor of philosophy at the University of Montana.
Paul C. Taylor is Presidential Professor of Philosophy at University of California, Los Angeles.
Aili Whalen is director of development and planned giving at Bellarmine University.
Mary Beth Willard is professor of philosophy at Weber State University.
Scott Woodcock is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Victoria.
Introduction
James Harold
Art has not always had the same salience in philosophical discussions of ethics that many other elements of our lives have. There are well-defined areas of “applied ethics” corresponding to nature, business, healthcare, war, punishment, animals, and more, but there is no recognized research program in “applied ethics of the arts” or “art ethics.” Art often seems to belong to its own sphere of value, separate from morality. The first questions we ask about art are usually not about its moral rightness or virtue, but about its beauty or originality. However, it is impossible to do any serious thinking about the arts without engaging in ethical questions.
Leo Tolstoy begins his What Is Art? by describing a day he spent at an opera house, watching rehearsals. He is horrified by the cruel behavior of the conductor toward the performers, and by the vast quantity of time and money that have been poured into staging a piece which is, he thinks, merely a mildly pleasing entertainment. To Tolstoy, this seems incredible—why would we sacrifice so much to make and consume art?
In every large town enormous buildings are erected for museums, academies, conservatoires, dramatic schools, and for performances and concerts. Hundreds of thousands of workmen, carpenters, masons, painters, joiners, paperhangers, tailors, hairdressers, jewellers, moulders, type-setters, spend their whole lives in hard labour to satisfy the demands of art, so that hardly any other department of human activity, except the military, consumes so much energy as this.
Not only is enormous labour spent on this activity, but in it, as in war, the very lives of men are sacrificed. Hundreds of thousands of people devote their lives from childhood to learning to twirl their legs rapidly (dancers), or to touch notes and strings very rapidly (musicians), or to draw with paint and represent what they see (artists), or to turn every phrase inside out and find a rhyme to every word. And these people, often very kind and clever, and capable of all sorts of useful labour, grow savage over their specialised and stupefying occupations, and become one-sided and selfcomplacent specialists, dull to all the serious phenomena of life, and skillful only at rapidly twisting their legs, their tongues, or their fingers. (Tolstoy 1904, 2)
What is most striking about Tolstoy’s discussion is not the specifics of his moral concerns, but the strength of his passion. Tolstoy is furious that art asks so much from us, that we give so much of ourselves to the production of art, and he wants to know what value we can get out of it beyond entertainment. For Tolstoy, art is itself an ethical problem that needs our attention.
Artworks do have moral costs and sometimes convey moral meaning. In some cases, art has appeared so morally dangerous that it seemed like the only reasonable thing to do is to ban it. And in other cases, art can seem like one of the key elements of living a good and meaningful life. What makes art morally good or morally bad? How do these judgments vary across history, culture, and different art forms? What does it mean for art to be morally good or bad? What, if anything, does morality have to do with art’s aesthetic value, or its value qua art? How does art affect and engage us in ways that matter morally?
Through much of the twentieth century, Anglophone philosophers mostly ignored the questions that mattered so much to Tolstoy. The relationship between ethics and art was barely discussed. This neglect was partly due to early analytic philosophers’ general disinterest in evaluative questions, and partly due to the dominance of formalist aesthetics in art criticism, which treated ethical questions as irrelevant to art evaluation (though see Gal’s chapter in this volume). Then, in the 1980s and early 1990s, work by Martha Nussbaum, Marcia M. Eaton, Noël Carroll, and Berys Gaut, among others, reminded Anglophone philosophers that there were important and difficult philosophical problems surrounding the intersection of art and ethics. In the immediate aftermath of this work, philosophers turned their attention to questions such as “Can we gain moral knowledge from artwork?” and “Do moral flaws in artworks affect artworks’ aesthetic worth?” They also reached back to earlier figures in the Western tradition, particularly Plato, Aristotle, Hume, and Kant, to think anew about ethics and art.
In recent years, the conversation has broadened even further. Some of these interests follow changes in society as a whole. The #MeToo movement put new emphasis on the problem of how to treat artworks by creators who have done morally awful things. The artworld has also become more aware of how racial, ethnic, and other identities are represented in artworks, and on who is doing the representing, as shown by public campaigns like #OscarsSoWhite. Public arguments about what to do with monuments and memorials that distort history or eulogize racists have focused attention on the moral meanings of these works. New, richly interactive artforms, such as video games, public art, and interactive online media, have posed moral problems of privacy and ownership in sharp and challenging ways. Academic philosophy is just beginning to struggle with these kinds of cases, and to confront philosophy’s own limitations, cultural biases, and other blind spots.
In recent years, philosophers have also begun to think about the connections between thinking about ethics and art and other philosophical questions. Is there a universal moral basis for judging art to be morally good or bad? For example, is it appropriate to judge ancient artworks by our moral standards? What is the difference, after all, between
judging something to be morally wrong and aesthetically bad? Can traditional moral theories offer any resources for thinking about ethics in art?
Overview of This Handbook
The aim of this volume is to give an overview of some of the most significant and exciting philosophical controversies concerning ethics and the arts. The aim is not to be complete; even a volume as long as this one cannot possibly hope to cover everything. Instead, this volume aims to be “comprehensive” in the older meaning of that term: that of offering an extensive grasp of a subject matter. Each section samples a mix of topics that have been widely discussed alongside those that have been less noticed by philosophers. What emerges is a sense of the great variety of different problems and approaches as well as some recurring and overlapping themes.
A deliberate effort has been made to stretch beyond some of the debates and problems most familiar to Anglophone philosophers. Familiar topics and positions have been placed side by side with new and neglected ones, sometimes suggesting surprising connections and conflicting approaches.
The volume is divided into four sections: Historical Perspectives, Theoretical Approaches, Individual Arts, and Problems.
Section I: Historical Perspectives
Chapters in this section cover significant historical and cultural periods in which philosophical debates about ethics and art became salient. Some chapters (e.g., Saito’s chapter on Japan) span hundreds of years; others focus on briefer historical eras (e.g., the Harlem Renaissance). These chapters show the wide variety of different concrete practices that were associated with the idea of “art,” as well as the great range of approaches to thinking about what constitutes an “ethical” concern. In many cases the latter includes political meanings such as racialized conceptions of the self. These chapters also make clear how larger historical, economic, and political circumstances have shaped how people think about ethics and art. The chapters appear in more or less chronological order, though there is often considerable overlap in the times covered across different cultural traditions.
We begin with the debates over the value of the arts, and especially music, in pre–Han China. The usual picture has it that Confucians defended the value of the arts in developing virtue (de), while the Mohists condemned elaborate musical performances as wasteful and dangerous. (The Mohists’ arguments anticipate Tolstoy’s in surprising ways!) To this picture, Eric Hutton adds further richness: for example, the Confucians take music’s value to lie in its role in transmitting human tradition and culture, whereas
the Daoists Laozi and Zhuangzi emphasize music’s connection to nonhuman nature. There are different conceptions at work here in thinking about what counts as “moral” when evaluating music. Hutton also notes the ways in which classical Chinese conceptions of “the arts” differ from contemporary Western thought.
Pierre Destrée’s chapter on ancient Greece has some new things to say about familiar figures like Plato and Aristotle, as well as in his discussions of Plutarch and Epicurus, whose contributions to this debate have been largely neglected. Destrée shows that Plato’s well-known condemnation of poetry also reveals a new possibility: that grappling with art’s moral dangers can itself, apparently paradoxically, result in moral learning. There is more complexity and depth to the Greek tradition than the traditional story of the quarrel between the philosophers and the poets.
Oliver Leaman’s chapter on morality and arts in Islamic tradition emphasizes a tension between two moral themes. On the one hand, many Islamic thinkers hold that there is a very close relationship between beauty and goodness, and Sufi thinkers have forged a similar link between goodness and the use of the imagination. On the other hand, Islamic thinkers have often been suspicious of the moral status of certain art forms, like pictorial images. Leaman also interrogates what is meant by “Islamic” when we speak of Islamic tradition, and shows both the variety of Islamic thought as well as how many features of Islamic thought draw from pre-Islamic sources and traditions.
In her wide-ranging chapter, Yuriko Saito examines Japanese ideas about ethics and art both pre-and post-Westernization (1868 ce). As we will see in many of the other chapters in this section, Western colonization and expansion impacted not only the practice of art, but also the moral possibilities expressed through art. Among other traditions, Saito discusses the mixed moral inheritance of Wabi aesthetics, which emphasizes imperfection and difficulty. On the one hand, Wabi aesthetics can cultivate open-mindedness; on the other hand, it can also be used to justify keeping imperfect or even unjust moral and political systems. Saito also shows how the Japanese traditional aesthetic attitude of attending to details of the everyday is also itself a moral attitude of cultivating careful attention toward others.
Timothy Costelloe’s chapter on the modern period in Europe shows that philosophers of this period were very interested in the connections between morality and aesthetics, but did not have as much to say about “the arts” as such (with some exceptions, such as Reid and Kant). Instead, they explored topics such as: moral and aesthetic beauty; the faculty of taste both in appreciating art and in morality; the picturesque, which seems to deny moral reality in favor of the pretty; and the role of deception in writing. The great variety and richness of this period goes well beyond the most famous passages from Hume, Shaftesbury, and Kant.
Barry Hallen’s chapter on Yorùbá tradition grapples with the picture of Yorùbá art and thought in the context of colonial narratives that regard Yorùbá as merely “traditional” or primitive. Hallen argues that in Yorùbá practice, art is intricately interconnected to both ethics and epistemology: in assessing art, we also assess its moral insight. He further argues for a kind of existential moral theme in Yorùbá art-making: a norm that art should authentically represent human life as it is.
In their discussion of the arts in India, Nalini Bhushan and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, like Hallen, emphasize existential themes. In precolonial India, they argue, art and ethics had a close relationship, but the fact of British colonialization raised new dilemmas for artists about what counted as ethical engagement with the arts. They examine how artists grappled with this problem by looking closely at some examples of poetry and painting.
The art-critical movement known as formalism has long played the antagonist role in narratives about ethics and art. The figure of the formalist denies any role for ethics in thinking about art, or so we are told. In her chapter, Michalle Gal challenges this narrative, showing that in the writings of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century formalists there is a subtle but important connection between art and ethics in formalist thought, through the internal normativity of the work, that art is a model for moral life.
Jacoby Adeshei Carter and Sheena Michele Mason’s chapter on the debates over art and ethics in the Harlem Renaissance emphasizes the complex and dynamic relationships between ethical ideas and the problems of racialization. The “great debate” between W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain LeRoy Locke over whether Black artists should make anti-racist art also implicates a wider variety of moral, artistic, and political issues having to do with what Blackness is in the first place, and whether and how it can be represented in the arts. One example they examine is the case of racial passing and narratives about the so-called mulatto/a in which the boundaries of racial categories are explored and challenged.
The last chapter in this section also focuses on how political questions shape ethical ones. Eva Kit Wah Man’s chapter traces the development of thought in modern China about the role art and artists should play in Chinese society. Man begins with Mao Zedong’s famous speeches in 1942 and takes us all the way up to the present day. In this chapter we see rival conceptions of art’s power to reshape society as well as questions about government control of the arts.
Section II: Theoretical Approaches
In the next section, we move from considerations of particular historical moments to a discussion of the theoretical issues in judging artworks morally. Here by far the most discussed question is the “value interaction debate”—do moral judgments affect aesthetic judgments, and vice versa? Four of the chapters in this section are devoted to discussing this important question. But there are other important theoretical questions here too, having to do with the nature of moral and aesthetic judgments in the first place, and with the grounds for judging artworks morally good or bad.
The section begins with four chapters that we might think of as “meta-evaluative”: chapters that ask about the objectivity and nature of the kinds of evaluative judgments that we make of artworks. Next, we look at how art might be evaluated morally given four different kinds of moral-theoretical approaches: Kantian, consequentialist, virtue
theoretic, and feminist. Last, we turn to the value interaction debate, covering the familiar positions of autonomism, moralism, and contextualism, as well as less-discussed position, aestheticism.
The first meta-evaluative chapter is Alex King’s. King focuses on the question of realism and anti-realism in aesthetics. Her approach takes the debates in metaethics over moral realism as a model for meta-aesthetics, by way of classic arguments for and against cognitivism. King takes moral realism to mean that there are genuine moral facts. Aesthetic realism, therefore, is the view that there are genuine aesthetic facts, and aesthetic anti-realism is the denial of this view. Cognitivism is the view that aesthetic or moral judgments are belief-like—they aim to represent the world as it is. She argues that while aesthetic anti-realism might appear to be the more intuitive view, aesthetic realism is much more plausible than it has often been thought to be, and so is a view worth taking seriously.
All debates about the interaction between moral and aesthetic value seem to assume that there is in fact some difference between the two types of value. In her chapter, Moonyoung Song examines the characteristics of aesthetic value, as well as artistic value, if that is distinct from aesthetic value. She considers the possibility such distinctions might not be invariant, or that there might not be any determinate answer to this problem.
In his chapter, Ted Nannicelli takes up the problem of moral relativism in the ethical evaluation of art. Many people are moved to condemn historical artworks that include sexist or racist elements, even if those sentiments were more widely accepted in the time of the work’s creation. Nannicelli questions this tendency, and defends a moderate version of moral relativism, which builds on Bernard Williams’s “relativism of distance.”
Sandra Shapshay offers the first of four accounts of what might make art morally good or bad: Kant’s own. According to Shapshay, the usual view of Kant on art that takes him to endorse an autonomist or formalist approach is wrong, or at the least, incomplete. Shapshay shows that according to Kant, art has moral value because of its role as a symbol of morality and its connection to the sublime, among other reasons.
A chapter on consequentialist approaches to art would seem to be quite straightforward: a consequentialist can judge art according to its morally significant consequences, just like anything else. But Scott Woodcock’s discussion illustrates the complexity and difficulty of applying different versions of consequentialism to evaluating art. He argues that these difficulties, rather than showing any weakness in consequentialism, are appropriate to the complexities inherent in the subject matter.
In her chapter on virtues and the arts, Nancy Snow explores the recent literature on virtue aesthetics. She shows the connections between virtue ethics, virtue epistemology, and virtue aesthetics in order to cast light on how the creation and appreciation of the arts might reinforce or undermine the development of various virtues.
In her chapter, Amy Mullin surveys the range of ethical perspectives that might be called “feminist” in connection with the evaluation of art. She concludes that there is no one approach or criterion for judging art that should be called feminist, but rather a
great variety. Feminist approaches to art, in fact, seem to be distinguished by their resistance to narrowness or pigeon-holing—they are inclusive, intersectional, and political.
The debate over “value interaction” is far and away the most thoroughly studied and discussed problem in contemporary Anglophone discussions of ethics and art. The question, put simply, is whether the moral judgment one makes of an artwork and the aesthetic judgment one makes of that artwork interact in some way, or whether they are independent or autonomous of one another. The first chapter on this topic, by NilsHennes Stear, takes up and evaluates the autonomist view (or set of views). Stear begins by reviewing autonomism’s history and its connection to formalism (though see Gal’s discussion here too). Stear argues that the existing arguments for autonomism suffer from a number of weaknesses, and that it should not be considered the default view.
Noël Carroll’s 1996 article “Moderate Moralism” was one of the first, and one of the most cited and discussed, contemporary forays into this debate. Here Carroll expands on the view he set out in that article and defends it against a wide variety of objections. Moralism, Carroll says, is the family of views that says that ethical evaluation of art qua art is appropriate. Carroll defends his preferred version of moralism not only from autonomism, but also from Berys Gaut’s ethicism, which Carroll understands as a particularly strong version of moralism. He also defends moralism against the view that has often been called “immoralism,” which is the topic of the next chapter.
In his chapter, Daniel Jacobson also revisits and defends a position first set out by him more than twenty years ago. Jacobson prefers the term “contextualism” to describe the view that many have sometimes called “immoralism”: the view that sometimes the moral defects in an artwork contribute to its aesthetic virtue. Paying careful attention to details of particular cases, Jacobson argues, shows that sometimes certain aesthetically valuable features of works are nonetheless morally flawed, but others wherein the opposite is true. Contextualism, according to Jacobson, relies on some very modest and plausible assumptions about art and ethics.
The final chapter in this section takes up a position that has been largely overlooked. Becca Rothfeld here defends aestheticism: the view that ethical judgments of artworks are sometimes at least partly grounded in aesthetic ones—that is, for example, a work of art can be morally bad because it is ugly. She surveys some historical precedents for this position, but the main goal is to show that the view is both plausible and attractive as an alternative to the three standard views of autonomism, moralism, and contextualism.
Section III: The Individual Arts
The third section of the Handbook takes up a number of individual art forms, and here authors consider ways in which the distinctive features of each art form give rise to specific sorts of ethical questions and problems. The list of art forms here is of course highly selective, but it includes both traditional “high” arts, as well as some forms of mass or popular art, and new art forms that have received less philosophical scrutiny. The aim in
this section is to see how these ethical evaluations are made in different kinds of cases, and to see how different approaches to ethical judgments emerge from these different art forms.
Elisabeth Schellekens’s chapter on ethics in paintings dives into particular cases. Schellekens offers a taxonomy of different ways in which paintings pictorially engage with ethics, such as the representation of a moral ideal, a moral emotion, or an ethical event that implicates the viewer. She focuses on what she calls ethical issues “internal” to painting, relating to the experience of the work itself and its thematic content. The value of these ethical elements of painting, she argues, is far from straightforward, involving problems of interpretation, reception, and more.
It is hard to think of an artform where ethics is more often discussed than literature. In his chapter, Peter Lamarque defends a conception of literature that recognizes that does not reduce literature to morality. Looking closely at a range of literary examples, Lamarque makes a robust case for literary autonomism. Attending to ethical issues in literature is not the same as thinking that what makes a work ethically good is the same as what makes it good as literature.
In his chapter on film, Carl Plantinga focuses on the ethical salience of film’s engaging the audience’s emotions. Reviewing the history of this relatively new art form, Plantinga concludes that an ethical approach to film must focus on the phenomenon of spectatorship. He argues that film has both positive moral potential, as when it engages and increases our empathy, and negative potential, as when it plays into and amplifies harmful stereotypes.
Kathleen Higgins’s approach to thinking about music is attentive to the range and variety of musical traditions from around the world. She maintains that a philosophical focus on music “itself” is not fruitful; we need to be attentive to contextual factors, including music’s social and psychological roles. Like Plantinga, Higgins recognizes the moral risks as well as benefits present in music. She argues that music in its fullest sense offers indirect contributions to human flourishing, as well as posing some moral dangers.
The art of theater is an ancient one and has long been a center of moral attention. In his chapter, James Hamilton attends closely to the moral problems that theatrical performers have grappled with. That is, in contrast to Plantinga’s chapter on film, the focus is not only on the ethics of being a spectator but also on the morally salient elements of performing. Hamilton considers the moral risks of acting, including the risks of preparing for a role and the moral challenges of cooperation with others. He concludes with a discussion of the moral obligations that performers have to spectators, arguing that there is nothing morally wrong with plays that merely “invite” audiences to imagine something immoral.
Like theater, dance faces ethical questions about performers who must interact with one another and with an audience in the same space, but there is also much that is distinctive. In her chapter, Aili Whalen reviews a variety of specific issues that arise from performers sharing space, touching one another, and interacting in highly intimate ways. She also discusses political aspects of dance, including problems of cultural
appropriation and discrimination, which illustrate some of the issues discussed on the fourth section. She closes with a discussion of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the awareness it has brought to public health considerations in the ethics of dance performance.
Saul Fisher’s discussion of ethics in architecture centers on a provocative idea: that works of architecture can be thought of as though they were agents, which then can have moral virtues or vices. Fisher notes that we live with architecture, that architecture has a life span, and that it both shapes and is shaped by our behavior. Works of architecture— our homes, our places of work and worship, and so on—serve as moral partners in our lives, and this service can be done well or badly.
Christopher Bartel takes up the ethics of video games, an artform that is the recurring subject of much moral hand-wringing in the popular press. While much of this public discussion is focused on the rather narrow question of whether playing video games is bad for the players, Bartel takes a broader view. He distinguishes between moral questions that are internal to gameplay, such as players imaginatively absorbing the values of a game while they play it, and those that are external to gameplay itself, which includes a wide variety of issues such as the environmental impact of the game industry. He also takes up moral issues on the border between internal and external, such as the role of “trolling” in games, and the ethics of multiplayer games.
A. W. Eaton offers an overview and assessment of pornography and erotic art. She begins by arguing that the attempts to distinguish between the two is itself an immoral project, as the works that are generally classified as “erotic art” and thereby superior are also those produced by and for upper-class white men. In her study of the ethics of pornography and erotic art, Eaton attends to the moral dangers of inegalitarian works, as well as the morally possibilities of egalitarian, sex-positive works of pornography and erotic art.
Paul Butterfield’s chapter on humor takes up three main questions: whether humor can be morally wrong at all, why humor might be morally wrong when it is wrong, and how humor’s moral status might affect its funniness. In doing so, Butterfield gives us another look at the value interaction problem. Throughout, Butterfield stresses the ambiguity inherent in humor, and how this complicates efforts to assess humor morally.
Jeanette Bicknell, Jennifer Judkins, and Carolyn Korsmeyer take up another topic that is perennially important but seems to be especially salient in recent years: the ethics of monuments and memorials. Monuments and memorials are built to endure, and the people who build them typically hope that their messages will last. But Bicknell, Judkins, and Korsmeyer argue that inevitably, the meanings and audiences for these works change. That fact, and the fact that such works have an inherently public character, complicates our ethical relationship to them.
In the final chapter of this section, Anthony Cross considers a group of new forms of cultural expressions that make use of the internet and social media, including viral videos and gifs. Cross emphasizes the radical nature of these new media, which allow nearly everyone to participate as creators and audience simultaneously. The communities that form around these practices can strengthen commitments to moral
values, for good or ill. And such media also challenge traditional conceptions of artistic ownership.
Section IV: Problems
The final section of this Handbook takes up moral problems in ethics and art that are not specific to any one artform. Some of these problems have to do with artists and ownership: what are the limits of artists’ rights, and how should we understand the moral claims arising from the ownership of art? What role do governments and audiences play here? Some of these problems arise from art’s role in society and how it can advance or set back a political movement. How are different marginalized groups represented in art? What counts as cultural appropriation in the arts, and under what conditions is it wrong? And some of these problems have important psychological aspects. How does art engage our moral imagination, and what can we learn from art, morally speaking? Each of the chapters in this section looks at some of these legal, political, and psychological questions, often all at once.
The first chapter in this section, by Karen Gover, is about artistic authorship. Gover studies the limits of the moral rights of artists, and discusses how this intersects with other moral rights, including that of the owner of the artwork and of the public. Gover argues that the rights of artists cannot always take precedence over other moral considerations.
Mary Beth Willard picks up some of the problems discussed in Anthony Cross’s chapter on internet art as well as those discussed in Jeanette Bicknell, Jennifer Judkins, and Carolyn Korsmeyer’s chapter on monuments and memorials. Willard is interested in the problems that arise when an artwork is public and its meaning is publicly contested. While Gover focuses on the rights of individual artists, Willard considers the role and value of group agency in fixing moral meanings. She shows that such art poses problems for our conceptions of democracy that we have only just begun to explore.
What should we do with the work of immoral artists? Some people think that we must “separate the art from the artist” while others find a grave moral wrong in continuing to enjoy artworks made by vicious people. In his chapter, Erich Hatala Matthes attempts to find a middle ground between these two positions. He argues that whether or not to engage with the work of immoral artists is not a yes or no question, but that we must instead think about how we engage with such works.
In the following chapter, C. Thi Nguyen and Matthew Strohl also take on another highly polarizing issue—the appropriation of artistic style—and they try to find a middle ground. Some philosophers have argued for highly restrictive approaches, according to which members of outgroups should not ever participate in artistic forms belonging to another group. Others have argued for a more permissive approach that minimizes the alleged wrongs or harms suffered by group members. Nguyen and Strohl stress the
dangers of paternalistic approaches to this issue, and defend a view built around group intimacy and consent.
Whereas many people disagree about whether cultural appropriation is wrong at all, the moral questions about forgery do not focus on whether it is wrong, but on what exactly constitutes forgery, and on what makes it wrong. Darren Hudson Hick, through careful discussion of individual cases, argues that the wrong of forgery is not one thing, but a constellation of wrongs of varying degrees of moral seriousness, and they include not merely harms to specific persons, but also issues of moral integrity and trust.
As in the case of forgery, it is widely accepted that the vandalism of art is morally wrong. In her chapter, Sondra Bacharach looks more closely at the variety of vandalism and comes to the surprising conclusion that vandalism is not always morally bad, and may sometimes be morally good. Bacharach carefully distinguishes between different types of vandalism, including “invisible” and “additive” vandalism, where the vandal is also a kind of artist.
As we saw in a number of chapters in the first section (such as Man’s chapter on modern China), the question of the government’s role in regulating and even censoring art is highly controversial. In his chapter, Brian Soucek considers the ethics of government regulation and sponsorship, but also goes on to discuss various kinds of nongovernmental power, including corporate power and popular movements, such as “cancel culture” and its backlash. In doing so, Soucek argues that the question of who is doing the regulation may be the most important moral question.
Many of the chapters in this volume discuss race and racism: the arts have been one of the most contested sites for thinking about race (shown most vividly in Carter and Mason’s chapter on the Harlem Renaissance). Adriana Clavel-Vázquez’s chapter on race and racism in art explores a central tension between two competing ideas. On the one hand, art can be a vehicle for resisting racism and asserting a positive racial identity; on the other, art can reinforce and strengthen existing racial hierarchies. Understanding the ethical value of race in art will mean connecting the moral with the political.
Paul C. Taylor’s chapter on ethics and representation in art considers the ways in which we ask of art that it be appropriately representative. He distinguishes between four different senses of representation: a work’s subject matter (aboutness), the interests that a work serves (fiduciarity), how a group of persons is portrayed (exemplarity), and the sense in which a work captures a cultural moment (expressiveness). Through an examination of a couple of recent examples, including the treatment of Black characters in Hamilton, Taylor argues that an understanding of the ethical meanings of representation is essential to our thinking about a host of other ethical questions involving the arts. In their chapter on the imagination, Joy Shim and Shen-yi Liao survey a wide range of interrelated topics. Some of these debates are quite familiar to Anglophone philosophers, such as the problem of imaginative resistance, in which audiences fail to imaginatively engage with artworks that ask them to accept an immoral idea. But Shim and Liao also direct our attention to a variety of other important questions about the imagination, such as whether and how imagination exercised through art can help to bring about political change.
The final chapter of the volume, by Eileen John, is on the topic of moral learning from art. While much of the attention on ethics and art has been negative (e.g., Mozi, Plato, Tolstoy), one very old idea is that the arts have a central role to play in one’s moral education. John distinguishes between four ways that moral learning might happen in the arts: protesting the moral status quo, expanding our moral circle, bearing moral witness, and starting a moral conversation. John defends the claim that art has a role to play in moral learning, while acknowledging the risks that go along with it.
Conclusion
The forty-five chapters in this volume, taken together, cover a lot of ground. If there is any common theme to be found here, it is likely to be just how fertile that ground is. Whether taking on old problems or new ones, well-known art forms with centuries of philosophical scholarship or still-evolving new forms, there is more to these moral questions than it seems at first. Collectively, the authors of these chapters issue an invitation to think and argue about these problems carefully and deeply.
As noted at the outset, there is no recognized subfield of applied ethics called “art ethics” or the like. And, looking at the contributions in this volume, it seems that there should not be. Such a classification would likely be too limiting. To think about ethics and the arts is not merely to apply ethical thinking to the arts: it means being ready to rethink our own assumptions about ethics, about the arts, about politics, history, and more.
Tolstoy was certainly right about one thing: art matters to morality. We just need to figure out how.
Reference
Tolstoy, Leo. 1904. What is Art? Translated by Almeyer Maude. New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company.
Part I HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON
ETHICS AND ART
chapter 2
Ethics and the Arts in Early China
Eric L. Hutton
Introduction
Concerning the relations between ethics and the arts, China provides such abundant material for reflection that no short essay can do it justice, not even one confined to just the early, formative period of Chinese philosophy (the sixth to third centuries bce). So instead of presenting a comprehensive overview, this chapter will give nonspecialists a highly selective introduction to some relevant discussions. Hopefully, some of my observations will also interest specialists in Chinese thought. Since uncertainty surrounds the dating of various texts, my analysis will be organized topically, rather than chronologically. I aim to equip readers to see both where debates in the Chinese tradition may overlap those of other traditions and where Chinese views about ethics and the arts are relatively distinctive.
To begin with, one must use caution in applying the categories of “ethics” and “the arts” to ancient Chinese discourse, as neither maps neatly onto how the Chinese themselves tended to talk about things. In the former case, while contemporary philosophers often distinguish ethics from political philosophy rather sharply, most ancient Chinese thinkers do not, and they also do not particularly treat aesthetics as a third, distinct subject matter. On the other hand, what constitutes “the arts” is a complicated question even among current Western thinkers, and the groupings of practices and products given in ancient Chinese texts do not correspond well with the category of “the arts” nowadays.1 Addressing these methodological problems adequately would require more space than
1 For example, one ancient Chinese term, liu yi 六藝, is typically translated as “the Six Arts” in English, and it refers to (1) ritual, (2) music, (3) archery, (4) horsemanship/charioteering, (5) calligraphy, and (6) counting/mathematics. While the second and fifth of these will fit comfortably within many people’s notion of “the arts,” the rest may not. That discrepancy raises a question about the extent to which the term yi 藝 corresponds to the notion of an “art.” As noted in the main text, however, due to constraints of space here I have chosen not to examine Chinese categories such as yi 藝 and other similar
