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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f
E T H IC S A N D A RT
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The Oxford Handbook of
ETHICS
AND ART
Edited by
JAMES HAROLD
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Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data
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
Subjects: LCSH: Art—​Moral and ethical aspects.
Classification: LCC N72 .E8 O94 2023 (print) | LCC N72 .E8 (ebook) |
DDC 175—​dc23/​eng/​20230503
LC record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​202​3014​257
LC ebook record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​202​3014​258
DOI: 10.1093/​oxfordhb/​9780197539798.001.0001
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
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Contents
Acknowledgments List of Contributors ix
xi
1. Introduction James Harold
1
I . H I STOR IC A L P E R SP E C T I V E S ON
E T H IC S A N D A RT
2. Ethics and the Arts in Early China Eric L. Hutton
3. Ancient Greek Philosophers on Art and Ethics: How Can
Immoral Art Be Ethically Beneficial? Pierre Destrée
15
31
4. Art and Ethics in Islam Oliver Leaman
46
5. The Ethically Grounded Nature of Japanese Aesthetic Sensibility Yuriko Saito
60
6. Art, Ethics, and Value in the Modern European Aesthetic Tradition Timothy M. Costelloe
78
7. The Knowledge That Joins Ethics to Art in Yorùbá Culture Barry Hallen
94
8. Art and Ethics in India in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Nalini Bhushan and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
104
9. Art and Ethics: Formalism Michalle Gal
123
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vi Contents
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
136
152
I I . T H E OR E T IC A L A P P ROAC H E S
TO E T H IC S A N D A RT
12. Meta-​Ethics and Meta-​Aesthetics Alex King
169
13. Distinguishing between Ethics and Aesthetics Moonyoung Song
187
14. Relativism and the Ethical Criticism of Art Ted Nannicelli
203
15. Kantian Approaches to Ethical Judgment of Artworks Sandra Shapshay
220
16. Consequentialist Approaches to Ethical Judgment of Artworks Scott Woodcock
235
17. Virtue Aesthetics, Art, and Ethics Nancy E. Snow
250
18. Feminism, Ethics, and Art Amy Mullin
267
19. Autonomism Nils-​Hennes Stear
282
20. Moralism Noël Carroll
302
21. Immoralism and Contextualism Daniel Jacobson
320
22. Aestheticism Becca Rothfeld
336
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Contents vii
I I I . E T H IC A L I S SU E S I N I N DI V I DUA L A RT S
23. Painting Elisabeth Schellekens
355
24. Ethics and Literature Peter Lamarque
375
25. Film Carl Plantinga
391
26. Ethics and Music Kathleen Higgins
407
27. Some Moral Features of Theatrical Art James R. Hamilton
424
28. Dance Ethics Aili Whalen
439
29. Architecture Saul Fisher
456
30. Ethics and Video Games Christopher Bartel
472
31. Art and Pornography: Ethical Issues A. W. Eaton
488
32. Humor Ethics Paul Butterfield
504
33. Monuments and Memorials: Ethics Writ Large Jeanette Bicknell, Jennifer Judkins, and
Carolyn Korsmeyer
521
34. Ethical Issues in Internet Culture and New Media Anthony Cross
542
I V. E T H IC A L P ROB L E M S I N T H E A RT S
35. Ethics of Artistic Authorship Karen Gover
563
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viii Contents
36. Group Agency, Alienation, and Public Art Mary Beth Willard
578
37. Immoral Artists Erich Hatala Matthes
593
38. Cultural Appropriation C. Thi Nguyen and Matthew Strohl
609
39. Forgery Darren Hudson Hick
627
40. Art, Ethics, and Vandalism Sondra Bacharach
643
41. Censorship and Selective Support for the Arts Brian Soucek
660
42. Art, Race, and Racism Adriana Clavel-​Vázquez
675
43. Representation, Identity, and Ethics in Art Paul C. Taylor
693
44. Ethics and Imagination Joy Shim and Shen-​yi Liao
709
45. Moral Learning from Art Eileen John
728
Index 743
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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.
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xii Contributors
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.
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Contributors xiii
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.
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chapter 1
I n t rodu c tion
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 self-​
complacent 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)
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2 James Harold
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
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Introduction 3
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
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4 James Harold
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.
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Introduction 5
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
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6 James Harold
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
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Introduction 7
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 Nils-​
Hennes 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
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8 James Harold
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
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Introduction 9
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
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10 James Harold
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
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Introduction 11
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.
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12 James Harold
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.
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