- This video is brought to you by BetterHelp.
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What's up, guys.
Michael here to talk about
my two favorite things in the world
after TikTok videos
of Aussie Shepherd puppies, of course.
That's right, philosophy and art.
What can I say,
I was educated in the finest
Florida public schools.
And there's an intersection
between the two
that's been all over the media lately.
Should art and entertainment
be moral or ethical?
It feels like recently,
media criticism has become super focused
on the supposed morality,
or lack thereof,
of popular films, TV, books, and so on.
This all led writer and critic, Wesley Morris,
to declare that "culture is being evaluated
"for its moral correctness
"more than for its quality."
We've seen this exemplified
in the media reaction to, say, "Joker,"
which many were convinced
would persuade people
to dress up like sad clowns,
land a guest spot on a talk show,
and shoot the talk show host
who they also have weird daddy fantasies about.
Or as Heather Anne Campbell tweeted,
"Can't believe the end of 'Joker'
"is Joaquin Phoenix
"turning to camera and saying,
"'Now you do Joker stuff.'"
In contrast, Adam McKay's "Don't Look Up"
was widely applauded,
but generally more so
for its moral appeal that we should,
you know, save the dying rock we live on,
rather than for its actual artistic merit.
This led many bristle
at the implication that
if you don't like the movie,
you don't care about climate change.
All of this has us wondering,
does good art need to be moral?
And when our culture debates
the morality of art,
are we asking the right questions?
Let's dive into this totally
not contentious issue
in this Wisecrack Edition
Should Art be Moral?
Note, this is a different question from
should we stop consuming art
made by a moral artist?
So we won't be discussing whether or not
you can still listen to
I Believe I Can Fly.
But before we get into it,
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And now, back to the show.
Now philosophers, critics and artists
have been debating the tension
between art and morality
since Ancient Greek times.
What's more, cultural hand wringing
about immoral art
turning us all into unprincipled hooligans
is nothing new.
For much of history,
art has actually been heavily controlled
by each era's moral authorities.
During the Middle Ages in Europe,
painters saw aesthetics crushed
by what scholar FB Chambers calls
the Christian Moral Resistance.
Like the infamous bonfire of the vanities in 1497,
where an incensed, fanatical Italian monk
convinced mobs to burn everything
he found "heretical."
From books to artwork,
to musical instruments, even makeup.
It's theorized that famous painter Botticelli
was even persuaded to burn
some of his own paintings
that were considered heretical.
In the Renaissance,
things changed a bit.
Painters like Leonardo da Vinci
defined their artistic duty
as uniting aesthetics and morality
into beautiful moral art.
But The Enlightenment changed everything.
The free thinking, more secular era
saw European artists
largely emancipated from moral policing.
What followed, as scholar Arnold Berlant writes,
was "an aberration in arts history"
as artists finally became basically autonomous.
Of course, this freedom left some disgruntled.
And over the centuries,
has led to artists like DH Lawrence
being taken to court
over their art's supposed immorality.
Though his publisher, Penguin Books,
was the one on trial
and we can only hope Mr. Penguin
was forced to take the stand.
Critiques of immoral art
have continued into the modern day.
Typically surfacing as moral panics
over the art children are consuming.
Rock n' roll was going to turn
the teens into sex monsters in the 50s.
and the 80s and 90s
saw major hysteria about violence
in rap, video games, action movies, and so on.
Surely, kids were being prepped
for lives of crime.
Of course, crime rates plummeted.
Straight up plummeted in the 90s.
But why let facts get in the way
of a good old fashioned moral panic.
At the same time,
there's been a recent reckoning
with some of history's
more questionable works of art.
Take "Birth of a Nation,"
which was once hailed
as a an astonishing feat
of early American filmmaking.
Today, it is better known
for almost single handedly
reviving the KKK.
And today, the tension
between art and morality lingers.
Artists aren't being explicitly policed
by, say, the church.
At the same time,
they are subject
to an increasingly loud
court of public opinion that,
especially on social media,
is often quite critical
of art's perceived moral shortcomings.
Take the low key hysterics
surrounding the release of "The Hunt,"
which re-imagined America's political divide
as hide and seek,
but add shotguns.
With all this,
we think the real overarching question
when it comes to ethical criticism of art is,
"Does the implied ethics of a work of art
"affect its aesthetic value?"
Scholar ‪Noel Carroll‬ characterized
the two main opposing sides
in the debate as such.
On one side there's autonomism.
This is the view that,
as Carroll writes,
"Art and ethics are autonomous realms of value
"and, thus, criteria from the ethical realm
"should not be imported
"to evaluate the aesthetic realm."
This is also called aestheticism
and its adherents argue
that art should be considered valuable
for its aesthetic qualities,
not for its ability
to morally enlighten or improve us.
As proponent Oscar Wilde put it,
"There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book.
"Books are well written or badly written.
"That is all."
More commonly, moderate autonomism
holds that it's possible
to morally evaluate art,
but it's just not relevant
to whether that art is actually
good or bad aesthetically speaking.
On the other side, there's moralism.
This is the view that
if a work of art has immoral implications,
those implications contribute
to its aesthetic defects.
Therefore, the aesthetic value of art
can be compromised by its immorality.
Now, let's take a closer look at each side.
Autonomism has quite a philosophical history.
The likes of Hume and Kant
believed that we have to separate
aesthetic and moral faculties.
Philosopher Francis Hutcheson
considered those faculties
distinctive enough to be considered
like different senses.
As in, hearing versus seeing.
Just like you can't
use your ears to evaluate the crumb
on this week's Bake Off,
you can't use your moral compass
to evaluate art.
Kant believed that what we consider
pleasurable aesthetically is our taste.
And what we consider pleasurable morally
is simply our moral feeling.
In more recent years,
scholar Clive Bell has argued that art,
or at least visual art,
needs to satisfy two essential features.
It provokes a particular
sort of emotional response
and that emotional response
is the proper basis
of its aesthetic evaluation.
Once we've judge something is art,
he argued, morality becomes about
as relevant as a piano is to a pig.
He notes that as, "Art is above morals,
"or, rather, all art is moral
"because works of art
"are immediate means to good.
"Once we have judged a thing of work of art,
"we have judged it ethically
"of the first importance
"and put it beyond the reach of the moralist."
Under this view,
you could judge "Joker"
as a work of art for engendering
the emotions of, say,
fear, anxiety, or coulrophobia,
i.e. fear of clowns
that go bump in the night.
This seems fair.
Thus Joker's moral message
is rendered irrelevant
and the work is beyond ethical reproach.
As Bell puts it,
we should "liberate the artist"
from moral judgment.
Then there's moralism,
which has dominated
for most of human history.
Carroll notes that before the wedge was driven
between ethics and aesthetics
by Hutcheson and Kant,
ethical criticism of art was common
and thought of as totally appropriate.
Prominently, there was Plato's criticism
of music and poetry in Republic,
which he believed was making kids naughty.
His argument culminates
with Socrates saying that poets,
including mother effin' Homer,
would be banned from the ideal city.
In the late 19th century,
Leo Tolstoy leaned into moralism,
rejecting aesthetic theories
that focused on beauty.
He complained that upper class European art
got bad when it stopped being religious.
And fretted that the resulting art
directly corrupts people
"by infecting them with the worst
"and humanly most harmful feelings.
"Chiefly, of sensuality."
And he never even lived to read
"50 Shades of Gray."
He draws an analogy with food.
People may eat food for pleasure,
but its real function is nourishment.
Likewise, people may consume art for pleasure,
but its real function
is to communicate.
Specifically, to communicate emotions.
The more the art infects you
with those emotions,
the better the art is,
so long as those emotions are
the ones valued by Tolstoy's
humanist brand of Christianity.
Deep religious feeling,
horror and injustice, and so on.
Moral virtue and artistic virtue
become one and the same.
Some moralists point to art
that is pretty objectively
morally troubling
to support their argument.
"Triumph of the Will"
is a common example.
Made by the Nazi state's
favorite director, Lenny Riefenstahl,
the movie unabashedly
worships Hitler and his ideology.
It is at the same time
an aesthetically creative
and groundbreaking work of cinema.
But moralists argue
that any aesthetic achievements
are sullied by the film's
objectively (beep) worldview.
Now, nobody wants to be the guy
who argues in favor of "Triumph of the Will."
But at first blush,
we do feel like the autonomists
make a good point.
After all, didactic art with a moral worldview
can have little aesthetic value.
Takes something like "The Blindside,"
which takes the morally correct stance
on the question of,
"Should we be racist?"
While at the same time,
offering very little in the realm of aesthetics.
What's more, lots of good abstract art
has plenty of aesthetic value,
but has no objective moral value.
Carroll calls the argument
regarding abstract art
the common denominator argument
and he finds it
the most persuasive of the autonomists.
Basically, we must be a able to apply
our criterion for evaluating art
to all kinds of art.
But as he explains,
"Since it is the case
"that much art does not
"concern morality directly,
"ethics cannot be the appropriate criterion
"for evaluating art."
If you can't apply moral judgment
to every piece of art, that is,
why should you apply it to any?
That said, we see the moralist point
when it comes to things like
"Triumph of the Will"
or "Birth of a Nation,"
so we're left pretty torn.
But before you despair,
there's one viewpoint
that offers a life saving curve ball.
And it was given
by writer and philosopher, Iris Murdoch.
For Murdoch, the function of the best art
is to pierce the veil
and let us see things
as they truly are.
But for her,
this vision is inseparable from virtue
and to convey a truthful vision of the world,
the artist needs to understand human virtue.
Truth then becomes the real morality.
Murdoch believed that the best art
holds up a mirror to reality,
including, and in particular,
moral reality.
But if an artist wants us
to better understand reality and morality,
they need to understand it
in the first place.
Under this thinking,
"Triumph of the Will and "Birth of a Nation"
can't possibly be considered great works of art
'cause they don't show
a true picture of the world.
They're both functionally racist fever dreams.
Philosopher AH Hannay takes it one step further,
arguing that art
can even push a society's morality forward.
"Art is then seen throughout history
"to be continually helping
"in the creation of new values,
"in the transvaluation of values."
Like how "Get Out"
can make us think about the way
white liberals contribute
to systematic racism,
or how "Parasite"
can make us rethink inequality,
or how "First Reformed"
reframes the environmental justice movement to ask,
"Should a drunk, horny priest
blow up his church?"
Now, without committing to moralism,
let's entertain the notion
that the ethical content of a work
is directly relevant to its value as art.
If that's true,
it's natural to ask whether a piece of art
could help us see the world more clearly
by openly depicting immoral content.
Some widely acclaimed films
about war and organized crime
might fit the bill,
or 90s rap that gave us
an unflinching picture
of what life was like in places
like Queens or Compton.
It's hard to imagine how Illmatic
could have been improved
by a cleaner, more unproblematic moral stance
or that "The Godfather" would've been better art
if nobody had played pranks with horse heads.
(screaming)
Philosopher John Stuart Mill said that,
"He who knows only his own side
"of the case knows little of that.
"His reasons may be good
"and no one may have been able to refute them.
"But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons
"on the opposite side,
"if he does not so much as know what they are,
"he has no ground for preferring either opinion."
That is to say,
if we only see our characters doing moral things,
we never get to experience immorality in art
and we can't truly call ourselves
fully morally engaged.
That means there could be value
in art that represents immoral activities,
if and only if,
it shows us a true perspective on the world
as laid out by Iris Murdoch.
And if it's a novel one,
all the better, right?
Of course, this is not without complication.
For example, the film "Scarface" is, for many,
a parable about how you shouldn't solve arguments
with machine guns.
But for some of the rappers featured
on MTV Cribs in the early 00s,
it's an aspirational tale.
What are we to make of that?
The honest answer might be
that as an artist depicting
morally questionable behavior,
you do not and cannot have total control
over how people interpret your work.
What's more, morality can be relative.
Thus, what does and does not
constitute immoral art can be fluid.
And that makes the task of morally evaluating
these works murky at best.
However, because immorality
does exist in the world,
portraying it truthfully could,
paradoxically, be a moral thing to do.
And what's more,
works that intentionally or not
display immorality
can also be highly useful to engage with,
even if they only reveal our own shortcomings.
And we think evaluating
the immoral virtue of art
is perhaps the crux of this media conflict.
People who criticize "Joker"
don't typically believe
that the film is endorsing
the Joker's actions.
They believe that the very depiction
of those actions is dangerous.
But if "Joker" shows wild clown antics
for the purpose of, say,
commenting on the scourge
that is America's underfunded
mental healthcare system,
then could its immorality
have a moral purpose?
To go back to Wesley Morris,
When we expect all of our art
to be morally upstanding,
there's a real consequence.
He writes, "We wind up with safer art,
"and discourse that provokes and disturbs,
"and shocks less.
"It gives us culture whose artistic value
"has been replaced by moral judgment
"and leaves us with monocriticism."
So maybe the real answer is that,
yes, art should be moral.
But its main moral obligation
is to be truthful about the world.
In which case,
art that shows the world's immorality truthfully
is a bit, ironically,
A-OK in terms of morality.
But what do you guys think?
Are the autonomists right
that ethics has no role to play
in evaluating art?
Are moralists like Tolstoy right
that immoral art makes us hedonists?
Is morality in art really just truth.
And if so, can immoral art
actually be totally moral?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
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