Evaluating art: Morally significant imagining versus moral soundness

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 60, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 137-149

  Mullin, Amy ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049129948     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1540-6245.00061     Document Type: Review

References (40)

1. See James Anderson and Jeffrey Dean, "Moderate Autonomism," The British Journal of Aesthetics 38 (1998): 150-166
2. Ron Bontekoe and Jamie Crooks, "The Inter-relationship of Moral and Aesthetic Excellence," The British Journal of Aesthetics 32 (1992): 209-220
3. Noël Carroll, "Moderate Moralism," The British Journal of Aesthetics 36 (1996): 223-238
4. Noël Carroll, "Moderate Moralism versus Moderate Autonomism," The British Journal of Aesthetics 38 (1998): 419-424
5. Mary Deveraux, "Beauty and Evil: The Case of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will," in Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, ed. Jerrold Levinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) pp. 227-256
6. Berys Gaut, "The Ethical Criticism of Art," in Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, pp. 182-203
7. Matthew Kieran, "Art, Imagination, and the Cultivation of Morals," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54 (1996): 337-351
8. and Richard Posner, "Against Ethical Criticism," Philosophy and Literature 21 (1997): 1-27
9. Marcia Muelder Eaton, "Contemporary Aesthetics and Ethics," in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 282-285
10. See also her article "Integrating the Aesthetic and the Moral," Philosophical Studies 67 (1992): 219-240
11. and the final chapter in her book, Aesthetics and the Good Life. (London: Associated University Presses, 1989) pp. 140-179
12. I am guided here by Eaton's account of aesthetic properties as intrinsic properties identified by a community as worthy of attention. A property of a work is intrinsic if and only if direct attention to the work is a necessary (although perhaps not sufficient) condition for verifying that the work has that property. See Marcia Muelder Eaton, "Intention, Supervenience, and Aesthetic Realism," The British Journal of Aesthetics 38 (1998): 279-293. Extrinsic features of artworks, which cannot be detected by an examination of the artwork itself (supposing that we are familiar with the cultural conventions governing its creation and construction), including information about the moral status of their creators, may not be aesthetically relevant
13. Kieran, "Art, Imagination, and the Cultivation of Morals," p. 344
14. Gaut, "The Ethical Criticism of Art," p. 192
15. Deveraux, "Beauty and Evil: The Case of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will," p. 255
16. Posner, "Against Ethical Criticism," pp. 11 and 16-17
17. Bontekoe and Crooks, "The Inter-relationship of Moral and Aesthetic Excellence," p. 212
18. The position I am calling moderate autonomism is called "sophisticated formalism" by Mary Deveraux, who notes that, although sophisticated formalists believe that aesthetic and moral evaluation are entirely distinct activities, they can nevertheless judge the aesthetic expression of a work's "message." See "Beauty and Evil: The Case of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will," p. 245. On this account, moderate autonomists are still limited to understanding the work's moral dimension as encapsulated in a message
19. Anderson and Dean, "Moderate Autonomism," p. 150
20. Carroll makes this presupposition explicit in his "Art and Ethical Criticism: An Overview of Recent Directions of Research," Ethics 110 (2000): 350-387. In characterizing his own view of moderate moralism, he writes that his view presumes that "typically artists intend to address their works to morally sensitive audiences" (p. 378)
21. In a tantalizing but not fully developed suggestion, Karen Hanson observes that it is not clear that "considerations of the morality of a work must take the form of a presumption about the work's 'recommendations. '" See Karen Hanson, "How Bad Can Good Art Be?" in Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, p. 219. She suggests that we may appreciate the power and grace of ideas we take to be evil, and that power and grace are "intellectual and moral virtues" as well as aesthetic qualities (p. 221). However, this seems to me still to take a work as necessarily making recommendations (she speaks of exhibiting power and grace in one's expression of a "side of the moral question") (p. 221)
22. Carroll, "Art and Ethical Criticism: An Overview of Recent Directions of Research," p. 367
23. Roger Scruton, Art and Imagination: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind (London: Methuen, 1974)
24. See, for instance, Gregory Currie, "Plot Synopsis," Philosophical Studies 89 (1998): 311-321
25. "The Moral Psychology of Fiction," The Australasian Journal of Philosophy 73 (1995): 250-259
26. and "Realism of Character and the Value of Fiction," in Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, pp. 161-181
27. Mark Johnson, "Imagination in Moral Judgment," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 46 (1985): 276
28. Scruton, Art and Imagination: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind, pp. 99-100
29. Arnold Isenberg, Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism (University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 274. Hanson notes that her position has affinities with Isenberg's
30. Anderson and Dean, "Moderate Moralism Versus Moderate Autonomism."
31. See Martha Nussbaum, "Exactly and Responsibly: A Defense of Ethical Criticism," Philosophy and Literature 22 (1998): 343-365
32. Nussbaum, "Finely Aware and Richly Responsible: Moral Attention and the Moral Task of Literature," The Journal of Philosophy 82 (1985): 516-529
33. For a more sustained account of this position, see her Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996)
34. Nussbaum, "Exactly and Responsibly," p. 345
35. Clearly, I disagree with the point of view taken by Arthur Danto in "Art and Disturbation," in his The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 117-133. For Danto, with the exception of art that regressively breaks down the barrier between the artist and the audience and introduces elements of danger into the artwork, even disturbing subject matter is "sweetened" by art, and increases the security of its audience (p. 121)
36. Carroll, "Art and Ethical Criticism," p. 366
37. Marcia Eaton, "Where's the Spear? The Question of Aesthetic Relevance," The British Journal of Aesthetics 32 (1992): 1-12. The remarks in question appear on page 4, where Eaton observes that her understanding of what is aesthetically relevant is close to that of Richard Wollheim. Both depend upon there being shared cultural traditions or cognitive stock in order to recognize what is aesthetically relevant
38. Clive Bell, "Art as Significant Form," in Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, ed. George Dickie, Richard Sclafani, and Ronald Roblin (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), p. 82
39. Suzanne Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Scribner, 1953), p. 49
40. The Kantian notion of disinterest is generally taken to prohibit concern with issues regarding the truth or morality of ideas presented by or advocated by a work in our aesthetic evaluation of it. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), p. 57