The debate provoked by the question, “is morally bad art bad art?”, concerns the proper relations between art and morality. If we answer in the affirmative, we take up the moralist position that an artwork’s moral defects are aesthetic defects as well, and thus, its moral merits are also aesthetic merits. If we answer in the negative, we take the autonomist stance that artistic value and moral value are separate dimensions and conflating the two would be incoherent. Between these two views lie several more moderate positions, of which Carroll’s moderate moralism is my thesis and the point-of-view I will argue for. In order to reasonably conclude with such a viewpoint, I will first look at two major opposing views within the ethical-artistic debate: the radically moralist and the radically autonomist. I then argue against autonomism, focusing on its inability to appreciate or capture all the functions and values that art inevitably serves. Following this, I contend that a moderate moralist view is able to appreciate the rich moral experiences afforded by art while not overlooking the primary aesthetic goals of artworks. My response to the question, then, is neither affirmative nor negative, but both. Morally bad art is sometimes bad art.
Let us speak post-theoretically with regards to the intrinsic natures of art and morality as concepts themselves and concern ourselves primarily with the question of their interactions. Broadly speaking, we could parallel the debate with the disagreement between Leo Tolstoy, who thought that art ought to be a means of moral criticism and education, and Oscar Wilde, who thought that art should be useless and is not meant to instruct or influence (Kieran, 2016).
In Tolstoy’s radically moralist view of the art-world, the creation and appreciation of artworks is centred around a moral dichotomy between the good and the bad. An artwork is good in this world if it engenders positive moral values and promotes ethical virtues. If an artwork does the opposite, that is, endorses problematic moral viewpoints and encourages vice, it is criticised and downgraded. The art-world as conceived by Wilde is ostensibly more colourful and open. In this world, art is engendered by beauty, creativity, flair and even moral mischievousness and transgression. It has the capacity as an open medium to allow limitless interpretation and appreciation, exempt from moral examination. The Wildean doctrine can be summed up as ‘art for art’s sake’ and is exemplary of the radical autonomist (or aestheticist) position in the ethical-artistic debate. It is from this viewpoint that we begin our investigation into the relations between art and ethics.
In a recorded debate, Kieran (2016) argued for aestheticism, proposing that while art is capable of a great many things, its proper aim is aesthetic excellence. This is to say that while artworks may induce cognitive experiences, it is instead the affective experiences they induce that count for their goodness qua art. Kieran claims that the practice of art is devoted to the creation and appreciation of artefacts whose sole purpose is to reward just that kind of appreciation, namely aesthetic appreciation. In response, Jones (2016) countered that this clearly demands too much of artworks and artists. On the aestheticist view, the best works of art are purely aesthetic (i.e. formal) and should only be engaged with aesthetically, outside of other experiences. By this definition, many of the greatest works of art would be bad art for the sole reason that they engage with content aside from the aesthetic. Artworks created with the intention to engage in some form of discourse, be it moral, political or religious, would be inherently flawed by virtue of not being purely aesthetic. This is, of course, an absurd idea. The radical autonomist chooses to overlook the myriad of functions and values that art can serve, in favour of a fanatical obsession with the formal properties of artworks. Needless to say, a radical moralist view such as that of Tolstoy’s, is equally absurd. On such a view, artistic value is reduced to moral value. A piece of art must provide some moral teaching or influence if it is to be considered good art. The glaring problem with this view is that it is unable to account for purely non-moral art. Abstract paintings, orchestral symphonies and the like are relegated to the wayside or thrown out of the arena completely. The radical autonomist and radical moralist views are fundamental and provide a primer for the ethical-artistic debate. However, given the varied and extensive range of art that exists today, they are theoretically irredeemable and should not be occupied as proper positions in the debate. We now turn to the contention between the more moderate autonomist and moralist views.
The autonomist view is motivated by a historical appeal to formalism. We can draw a distinction between an artwork’s form and its content. In cinema, for example, a film’s cinematography, production design, visual effects, editing, lighting, music and sound, etc., are constitutive of its form. Its content, then, is what the film represents and depicts, i.e. narratives, themes, messages, events, etc. The formalist claim is that what is relevant to aesthetic value is form, not content. While this is perfectly fine for abstract, non-representational art like that of Jackson Pollock’s, it faces severe difficulties in evaluating narrative art. A great literary novel has no “form” aside from, perhaps, the quality of its use of language and narrative structure. Everything else that is considered to make a novel “good”, has to do with its content. I will return to this point on narrative art later in my defence of moderate moralism. In fact, the formalist claim even has trouble with visual art as it is not always possible to separate form and content. Carroll (1999) gives the example of Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.
In the painting, the eponymous Fall of Icarus is depicted in a very small section in the bottom-right corner. We can see Icarus’ legs flailing about as his torso is submerged underwater. Carroll critiques that there is a formal tension here, embodied by asymmetry. However, in order to appreciate this formal quality, we must attend to its representational content, i.e. its being a depiction of the fall of Icarus. The relevant formal tension could not be detected nor appreciated if we consider the content of the painting to be irrelevant. Thus, the formalist claim should be rejected on the grounds of its incompetency in evaluating both narrative and visual representational art.
The formalist appeal embodies an essentialist bias, that there must be an essential quality of all artworks that can be fairly evaluated. This is illustrated in Carroll’s (1996) common denominator argument for moderate autonomism. Firstly, Carroll notes that there are obviously many artworks outside the moral domain, e.g. instrumental music, abstract paintings, etc. Second, he claims that “whatever we identify as the value of art should be such that every artwork can be assessed in accordance with it.” It follows from these two premises that, since any artistic value must be applicable to all artworks and some artworks cannot be evaluated morally, that moral value is autonomous from artistic value. The common denominator argument is seen by some as the central argument for moderate autonomism. It contends that, while some artworks have moral character or do express moral attitudes, these moral values do not impede on its aesthetic value. The main problem with this argument, in my view, is its second premise. Given the vast variety of art, it is intuitive that we have different methods and standards of evaluation for different types of art. We do not evaluate the artistic quality of a painting, a novel and a musical piece in the same way. How then, can one claim that there must be an essential singular standard of artistic value to be used in the evaluation of all artworks? Dissidents might counter that there is an overarching standard of beauty, significant form, ‘strikingness’ or whatever else, to be used in evaluation of all art. Perhaps this is so for first-impression judgments. However, when we evaluate in greater detail, we absolutely do appeal to more specific standards. In critiquing a novel, a painting, a symphony and a film, I could not in good conscience use the same standard of “beauty” across the board. That would be a terrible reduction of their various artistic properties.
The moderate autonomist wishes to separate moral value from artistic value. In this quest, proponents sometimes use the example of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935). The film is well-produced, visually arresting and cinematically innovative. However, it is also a morally reprehensible Nazi propaganda film that glorifies the Third Reich, Hitler and his political agenda. On this case, the moderate autonomist would acknowledge the repugnance of its subject matter, but still hail it as an artistically excellent film. The moderate moralist, however, would contend that its moral repugnance overrides or prevents uptake of its aesthetic qualities. In arguing for the inseparability of aesthetic and moral value, we can take another case, Picasso’s Guernica (1937).
Guernica can certainly be appreciated for just its aesthetic value. Critics could praise its monochrome colours and its merging of Cubist and Surrealist aesthetic. However, if a critic failed to acknowledge the fact that Picasso painted it to protest the bombing of Guernica by the Luftwaffe in the Spanish Civil War, they would be guilty of ignoring a key part of its artistic value. One cannot have a meaningful aesthetic response to Guernica without considering the moral emotions that Picasso held while painting it and the moral emotions it induces in us as an audience.
Finally, we turn to Carroll’s moderate moralism, the view that some artworks may be evaluated morally and that sometimes the artwork’s moral defects/merits will also be aesthetic defects/merits. From a historical perspective, there is much evidence that artists have always used art to deal with moral matters. Propaganda art, religious art, feminist literature, music developed in counterculture movements, etc. These are all examples of art intertwined with the moral concerns of their creators. Like the case of Guernica, separating the moral and aesthetic dimensions of these artworks would be an injustice to their creators. Their moral contexts are germane to their value qua art and should be evaluated as such. I now return, as promised, to my objection to the formalist claim on the basis of narrative art. Some kinds of art, or genres, modulate the moral effects of their artworks. Carroll contends that it is a special feature of some genres, notably narrative art (e.g. literature, film, drama, etc.), that they naturally induce moral reactions, motivate moral discussion and thus, warrant moral evaluation. The reason for this is that it is in the nature of a narrative to be incomplete. Film, novel or play, there are countless presuppositions made in the writing of the narrative and it is the task of the audience to fill in the gaps. These gaps can range from the mundane and trivial (e.g. presupposing that the laws of physics still apply in the Lord of The Rings’ Middle-Earth) to the folk-psychological (e.g. presupposing that isolation and past trauma can contribute to mental instability in Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle). It is inherent in our appreciation and understanding of narrative art that we automatically fill in the gaps. Crucially, we also fill in the emotional gaps prescribed by the author, and this is where morality comes into play. One cannot appreciate the narrative, enjoy the horror, or understand the themes of Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018) if one does not think that the loss of a child merits grief in a bereaved parent. Through input of our own emotional understanding, we form moral associations within the narrative, often as the author intended. Whether this is anger at the injustice dealt to a beloved protagonist, or relief upon seeing a repulsive villain get his comeuppance, our moral emotions are activated and mobilised in order to complete the narrative experience. Thus, it is natural and appropriate to discuss and evaluate these artworks morally. With the above understanding, we now want to answer two questions: a) if moral discussion is germane to narrative artworks, how do we evaluate the moral dimension? And b) having evaluated the moral dimension, when is a moral flaw also an artistic flaw?
The intuitive moral evaluation of a narrative artwork would consist in whether the art deepens or perverts our moral ideals. That is, if the ultra-violence in Takashi Miike’s Ichi the Killer (2001) seems to desensitize us to violence and promote sadism, it is morally defective. Similarly, if we seem to glean deeper moral understanding about racism and the cycle of harm it creates from Tony Kaye’s American History X (1998), it is morally praiseworthy. Some would counter this by arguing that artworks do not have morally educative powers and only depict moral truisms. Nobody learns that totalitarianism is bad by reading Orwell’s 1984 (1949), it merely reinforces what we already take to be moral ideals. I reject this argument on the grounds that moral education does not consist only in attaining new moral beliefs. More often, moral education consists in the practice and application of our moral beliefs in different situations. Scorsese’s mob films do not “teach” viewers that criminal life is wrong, nor does it encourage such a lifestyle. Instead, in watching Goodfellas and Casino, I come to better appreciate the allure of a criminal lifestyle and better understand the inevitability of justice and the downfall of the corrupt.
We have established that for some art, notably narratives, moral evaluation is appropriate and consists in discerning if the art deepens or perverts our moral ideals. We now need to account for when these moral merits/defects are also aesthetic merits/defects. Having done so, we will have a solid account of moderate moralism. Carroll’s (1998) chief argument for moderate moralism is sometimes referred to as the uptake argument. As discussed, some artworks rely on audiences’ emotionally salient responses to achieve their aesthetic goals (e.g. finding American Psycho to be satirically humorous). However, audiences can only respond appropriately with emotion by making moral judgments. If a moral defect in an artwork prevents us from making that judgment (e.g. by depicting excessive violence that overwhelms any chance of humor), the artwork fails to ‘secure uptake´ of its desired emotional response, i.e. it fails on its own terms. Failure to secure uptake is an aesthetic defect, caused by the artwork’s moral defect. In such a case, the moral defect is also an aesthetic defect. Thus, morally bad art can sometimes be bad art. We pity Tony Soprano for his chronic depression and emotionally abusive mother only because we also know him to be a family man and to have morally good traits. If instead, he was portrayed as a lustful bachelor and only went around breaking legs and burying bodies, we would not feel pity for him. In this alternate version of The Sopranos, David Chase fails to secure the desired emotional uptake for his protagonist, demonstrating an aesthetic defect. The cause of which, is the moral defect of the artwork in failing to portray a tragic hero as morally redeemable.
In sum, I have outlined the ethical-artistic debate between autonomism and moralism. Arguing against moderate autonomism and towards moderate moralism, I hope that I have presented a concrete account of moderate moralism and its plausibility over moderate autonomism.
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