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.