Dangerous Art: On Moral Criticism of Artworks

193 Pages·2020·1.428 MB·English

by  Harold James

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.
However, not all moral criticism of art is unserious. There is a long tra-
dition of serious and sincere concern about art’s moral value. In ancient
Greece, Plato offered a number of reasons for thinking that listening to
performances of the Odyssey could weaken a person’s moral character. The
classical Chinese philosopher Mozi called for an end to the courtly music of
his era, as it was too costly to produce. During the 1920s, Alain Locke wor-
ried that Claude McKay’s writing could undermine the important social aims
of the Harlem Renaissance. And today, some works of art reasonably strike
us as either morally edifying— as some have claimed about great literature—
or morally dangerous—a s some have claimed about racist and misogynist
films. We also wonder how to feel about Woody Allen’s films, or Louis C.K.’s
stand- up. The question of the morality of art seems inescapable, given how
important engaging with the arts is to our lives. Philosophers of art have
often used the claim that some works of art are morally good and others mor-
ally bad as a premise in other arguments. Having assumed that Triumph of
the Will (Riefenstahl, 1935) is morally corrupt, what follows?
The purpose of this book is to explore this terrain—t o consider what
grounds we have for judging works of art morally, to consider how these
moral judgments of artworks fit into our thinking about their value as art,
and so on. The book is divided into two parts. The first part takes up the moral
question on its own. What could it mean to say that a work of art is immoral?
This seems quite different from saying that another person is immoral. The
Dangerous Art. James Harold, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197519769.001.0001.
2 Dangerous Art
second part steps back and asks about how moral evaluation of art fits into
the larger task of evaluating artworks. If an artwork is immoral, what does
that tell us about how to value the artwork? Specifically, should it affect our
judgment of the work’s aesthetic value?
The problem of the first half is curiously understudied. While the relation-
ship between aesthetic and moral value has been thoroughly explored, the
philosophical assumptions behind this relationship, including assumptions
about how we can justify our moral judgments and how they are related
to aesthetic judgments in the first place, have been mostly ignored by con-
temporary philosophers. This is surprising. Philosophers have often made
judgments about the moral worth of individual works of art, and some phil-
osophical debates, such as the moralism/ autonomism debate, depend on
there being some way to judge art morally. Surely it matters how we make
these judgments, and what the grounds of those judgments are. We ought not
simply take it for granted that morally evaluating artworks will be a straight-
forward matter. The first half of the book aims to address this oversight.
The approach of the book is moderately skeptical. The book argues that
many of the reasons given for thinking that works of art are immoral do not
stand up to careful scrutiny. It further shows that even when works of art are
rightly condemned or praised from a moral point of view, the relationship
between that moral judgment and their value as artworks is complex. The
book defends a moderate version of autonomism between moral and aes-
thetic judgment. We may be right to judge that an artwork is both wicked and
beautiful, and nothing requires us to judge an artwork to be more or less val-
uable aesthetically just because we judge it to be morally bad. The underlying
aim of the book is to highlight the complexities and difficulties in evaluating
artworks morally—t o challenge the implicit assumption that artworks can be
morally evaluated in a fairly straightforward way, just as we judge the actions
or character of a person.
The first part of the book does not deal with questions about aesthetic
value or about meta-e valuative theory. Instead, it focuses on moral questions
regarding art. The second part of the book, particularly Chapters 6 through
Chapter 8, is somewhat more theoretical than the first. In the second part,
the focus is on locating the most plausible general theory of how moral and
aesthetic evaluations differ and how they relate to one another. A reader who
was mainly interested in these theoretical questions about the status of aes-
thetic and moral value could begin with Chapter 5. A reader who was prima-
rily interested in the moral judgments we make concerning art could begin
Introduction 3
with Chapter 1, but then skip Chapters 6 through 8 to the concluding discus-
sion in Chapter 9.
The book defends an expressivist meta- evaluative theory that avoids
meta- evaluative realism, and an autonomist approach that preserves the in-
dependence of aesthetic and moral judgment. While the book defends an
expressivist meta- evaluative approach, the argument for autonomism does
not depend on it. The goal is to sketch a modest and plausible framework for
thinking about how to make sense of both the differences and the relation-
ship between moral and aesthetic judgment.
Another goal of the book is to take a relatively broad view of the various
ways in which we consider and judge art. Anglophone philosophers have
on the whole tended to focus rather closely on the kinds of judgments and
questions that have dominated discourse about art in modern and contem-
porary Europe and North America. This book incorporates the questions
and ideas of two philosophical traditions that are often overlooked: Chinese,
especially Confucian, philosophical thought, and the philosophical debates
of the Harlem Renaissance. Chapter 6 focuses on the problem of value
scheme relativism: the worry that the distinction between aesthetic and
moral judgment is itself an arbitrary or at least historically contingent one.
This book aims to place the contemporary anglophone debates in philosophy
in a slightly larger context. Once we have done that, it is easier to see that the
assumptions that some philosophers have made about moral judgments of
artworks are not obvious.
There are also some important problems and questions concerning art
and morality that this book does not take up. This book does not discuss the
potential political consequences of making moral judgments of art. Plato
is infamous not merely for his condemnation of Homer, but for his calling
for censorship of the work of the poets. If we judge artworks to be immoral,
should we then ban those works, or at least regulate them? Or are freedom
of speech and of artistic creation so important that even immoral art should
be protected? What should society protect? These are interesting and impor-
tant questions, but they are not discussed in this book. However, it is im-
portant to note, as we will see in Chapter 2, that no answer to these political
questions follows directly from the moral judgment itself. Whether or not
one accepts the claims argued for in this book does not in any way force one
to take a position on these further political questions. We already do make
moral judgments of art. The aim of this book is to help us think more care-
fully about how to do that and what it means to do so.
4 Dangerous Art
This book also, and importantly, focuses on the judgments we make about
works of art without making any attempt to define art or to say what works
of art are. The examples used here come from different art forms, and the
approach is intentionally open- minded about what counts as art. Not only
works of “fine art” are counted, but also all kinds of popular art, including
stand- up comedy and television shows.1
No particular theory of art is presupposed here; it is hoped that the
discussions of artworks herein are compatible with a great number of
(though certainly not all) different definitions of art. The goal is to be inclu-
sive of the kinds of artifacts that we create for each other and ordinarily call
art, but about which we tend to raise moral concerns and questions. While
the book does take a broad view of what counts as art, it does not take up
similar problems concerning the natural world. Some natural scenes, or
some things that people do with nature, or even everyday artifacts, might be
thought to be morally good or bad while also having significant aesthetic in-
terest. It is possible that the account offered in this book could be adapted to
the case of natural environments or everyday objects, but such an extension
is not given here. The book focuses on the artworks that people make, enjoy,
and argue about.
What follows is a brief synopsis of each chapter.
Chapter 1. Morality and Art: A Little History. This chapter sets out the main
moral questions to be explored more fully in the chapters to follow. It does
this by studying three well- known debates about morality and art: first, from
classical China, the debate between Mozi and Xunzi about the value of music;
second, from ancient Greece, the difference between Plato and Aristotle over
poetry; and third, 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 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—t he ideas of Alain LeRoy Locke and the Confucian philosophers are
particularly important to arguments later in the book.
Chapter 2. 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
1 For a robust defense of the status of popular arts, see Noël Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Introduction 5
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 research from the social sciences and
A. W. Eaton’s approach to pornography, 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 ex-
ample, 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. The claim that we
should judge artworks to be morally good or bad by looking at, for example,
the attitudes manifested by them, faces serious objections.
Chapter 3. Wicked Artists. This chapter takes up the problem of immoral
artists. When an artist commits serious moral wrongs, some are tempted to
treat that person’s art as though it were also morally tainted by association
with its creator. The question is whether this is the right judgment to make.
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 them-
selves morally bad. It argues that this view is implausible. Second, the chapter
considers the possibility that communities around bad artists are tainted
by the artist’s bad actions. This view is much more promising. This view is
defended against some objections. The primary conclusion of the chapter
is that we should not, for the most part, think of works themselves as being
moral or immoral because their creators are.
Chapter 4. Art and Moral Understanding. This chapter takes up the ques-
tion of whether we might gain moral knowledge from art, and whether
art might corrupt our moral understanding. The first section takes up
arguments in favor of the cognitive benefits of art. It considers some of the
objections to these arguments, and considers the case at best unproven and
perhaps overly optimistic. The second section turns to 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. Both of these arguments, in any case,
turn on an empirical question— does our moral cognition or understanding
in fact change because of the art we experience?— and so cannot be answered
from the armchair. The final section takes up a slightly different question: the
question of whether trying to gain moral understanding is the best way to en-
gage with art. It argues that, in most cases, it is not— that it is more fruitful to
6 Dangerous Art
think of artworks as offering us moral themes to consider than as offering us
moral claims to believe. The upshot is that most artworks’ moral value is not
cognitive value.
Chapter 5. Artworks and Persons. This short chapter recapitulates the
main conclusions of the previous chapters and expands them slightly. 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 char-
acter or our understanding— but these effects can be hard to detect, and
they might be either good or bad. Our engagement with art can also af-
fect our relationships with others in our affective communities, and these
effects can matter too. However, the arguments thus far do not 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.
Chapter 6. From Relativism to Expressivism. This chapter begins with a
relativist challenge: not every philosophical tradition recognizes a clear dis-
tinction between aesthetics and morality. The chapter includes a discussion
of ancient Greek, classical Chinese, and Yoruba conceptions of the relation-
ship between moral and aesthetic judgment. But there are alternatives to
relativism. The second section turns to Alain Locke’s response to the rela-
tivist challenge: an expressivist account of different modes of valuing. The
final section draws on the arguments of the neo- Confucian philosopher
Wang Yangming to support this expressivist approach. The advantage of
expressivism as a response to relativism is that it can explain the variety of
different value schemes while still showing how a distinction between aes-
thetics and morality can be important to us.
Chapter 7. An Expressivist Account of the Differences between Aesthetic
and Moral Judgments. The chapter canvasses seven different criteria for
distinguishing between aesthetic and moral judgments. Five of these cri-
teria are quite familiar; two less so. The expressivist account defended in
Chapter 6 can illuminate the differences between morality and aesthetics.
This approach is defended against an objection from moral particularists,
who treat moral and aesthetic judgments as (roughly) the same. The aims
of the chapter are to show that, while the distinction between moral and
aesthetic judgments is far from perfect, there are a wide variety of cases in
Introduction 7
which it makes good sense to distinguish them, and that the expressivist
approach illuminates these differences well. This is important because,
since our moral and aesthetic judgments are distinct, they can sometimes
conflict.
Chapter 8. Should Moral Judgments Affect Aesthetic Judgments (or the
Other Way Around)? This chapter offers both a defense of autonomism—
the view that aesthetic and moral judgments can be kept independent of
one another— and an argument that the discussion of the issue needs to be
thought of as normative, not descriptive. When we ask whether judging
Triumph of the Will 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? This chapter concludes with replies to objections from
both those who endorse a stronger link between morality and aesthetics and
those who prefer a complete separation.
Chapter 9. Conclusions and Illustrations. This chapter concludes the book
by applying the methods defended here to a variety of different kinds of
examples of moral criticisms of art. Criticisms of entire categories of art (like
“slasher” horror films or racist “narratives of moral gentrification”) are con-
sidered as well as criticisms of individual works, like The Merchant of Venice
and Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman (2018). Finally, the chapter returns to the
cases discussed in Chapter 1 to consider what else we might say about these
historical cases.
The book as a whole aims to show that the moral evaluation of art is
both simpler and more complex than we often imagine. It is simpler in two
ways: first, we do not need novel or sophisticated moral theories to evaluate
art morally: we can judge art using straightforward criteria, such as how it
affects its audience. Second, we have no need of elaborate or dubious met-
aphysical entities to prop up a meta- evaluative approach. We can use the
more familiar and plausible facts about how we evaluate art and how we
think about those evaluations rather than depending on some version of
meta- evaluative realism. However, the approach defended here is more com-
plicated than we might prefer in other respects. It will often be hard to de-
termine in particular cases whether an artwork is good or bad, and it will
be easy to make mistakes: an artwork might initially appear to have good
effects and only much later be revealed as morally dangerous, or vice versa.
And there will be no generally compelling rules that tell us how to deal with
8 Dangerous Art
evaluative conflict: if a work we love as art turns out to be morally bad, there
will be many different ways of managing that conflict, none of them obvi-
ously right. But these complexities are ones that we must live with, because
they accurately reflect the complexities of the great many ways in which we
interact with and care about the different sorts of things we call art.
1
Morality and Art
A Little History
“Nowadays, there are large states attacking small states. There are
large families striking at small families. The strong plunder the weak.
The many tyrannise the few. The cunning deceive the foolish. The
noble are arrogant towards the lowly. And robbery, disorder, theft
and plunder all arise and cannot be stopped. If this is so, then sup-
pose we strike the great bells, beat the sounding drums, strum lutes,
blow pipes, and brandish shields and battle-a xes. Will this enable
good order to be imposed on the disorder of the world? I certainly
don’t think so.” This is why Master Mo Zi said: “As before, imposing
heavy taxes on the ten thousand people in order to make the sounds
of the great bell, the sounding drum, lutes and pipes won’t help in
seeking to promote the world’s benefits and eliminate the world’s
harms.” This is why Master Mo Zi said: “Making music is to be
condemned.”
— Mozi, fifth to fourth century bce1
In that case, Glaucon, when you meet admirers of Homer— who
tell us that this is the poet who educated Greece and that for the
management of human affairs and education in them, one should
take up his works and learn them and live guided by this poet in
the arrangement of one’s whole life— you should befriend and wel-
come them, since they are the best they are capable of being. And
you should agree that Homer is the most poetic of the tragedians
and the first among them. Nonetheless, be aware that hymns to the
gods and eulogies of good people are the only poetry we can admit
into our city. For if you admit the honeyed Muse, whether in lyric
1 Ian Johnston, The Mozi: A Complete Translation (New York: Columbia University Press,
2010), §32.4.
Dangerous Art. James Harold, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197519769.001.0001.
10 Dangerous Art
or epic poetry, pleasure and pain will be kings in your city instead
of law and the thing that has always been generally believed to be
best—r eason.
— Plato, fifth to fourth century bce2
Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of
the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art
I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining
the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any
art that is not used for propaganda.
— Du Bois, 19263
When we ask about whether a work of art is moral or immoral, there are a
number of things we might mean. A productive way to begin to unpack the
question is to look at a few different debates about morality and art from dif-
ferent times and places in a bit of detail. By doing this, we can see more clearly
what issues are at stake when we argue about art and ethics.
Here I take up three very famous such arguments about morality and
art from different periods of history: the dispute between Mozi and
Xunzi about the value of music in classical China; the contrast between
Plato’s and Aristotle’s views about poetry in ancient Greece; and the de-
bate between W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain LeRoy Locke about the moral
responsibilities of black artists during the Harlem Renaissance. Each of
these arguments highlights somewhat different, but overlapping, issues.
For Mozi and Xunzi, the crux of the matter is how we weigh the material
and human costs of making music against its character and community-
building effects. For Plato and Aristotle, the critical matter is poetry’s re-
lationship to reason: whether poetry infects us so as to undermine the
use of our reason, or whether poetry offers cognitive insights as well as
emotional benefits. Du Bois and Locke turn their attention to the role of
the artist, and whether artists have a moral obligation to uplift their in-
tended audience.
The goal of this discussion is to set out some of the major questions and
problems to be taken up in the rest of the book: in other words, to give an
overview of the philosophical landscape.
2 Plato, Republic, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005), 607a.
3 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” The Crisis 32 (1926): 290–2 97, at §26.