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Art and ethics Moderate, epistemic and systemic moralism Art and Ethics Statements of Breton, Stockhausen, Hirst about the supreme artwork: shooting people, 9/11. Can these actions be considered as an artwork? Relations between art and morality Platonism or radical moralism (Republic, books II-III and X): Art leads to immoral behaviors Utopism”: art as such is always morally edifying, and lastly, emancipating (Marcuse Adorno). Radical autonomism or aestheticism: artistic and moral realms are completely separate, e.g. Oscar Wilde Relations between art and morality Moderate autonomism: while some artworks, but not all, are morally worthy or harmful, their moral value has nothing to do with their value as art (Posner, Beardsley, Gass). Ethicism: a moral flaw in a work is as such an aesthetic one (Hume, Tolstoy, Kendall Walton, Wayne C. Booth, Berys Gaut) Variable extreme moralism: all artworks are morally good or bad to one or another determined degree. Relations between art and morality The problem is not whether there is a relation between artistic and moral in a work. From my point of view, there is. The problem, rather, is what the nature of that relation is. One of the most problematic issues about some works is precisely that they can and actually do force us to agree to world views that we consider morally problematic. It is not a question of fictionally assenting to particular propositions, but rather to the entire world view expressed by the work within which the propositions are located. This is the reason why I think that moral considerations can directly affect the value of a work as art. Relations between art and morality Moderate moralism Possible solution: moderate moralism (Noël Carroll): some works, but not all, have moral value. Sometimes, but not always, moral flaws and virtues involve artistic flaws and virtues, that is, we cannot sharply say that moral features of a work as such play a direct role in its resulting artistic value. Moderate Moralism It might happen that we are not in disposition to affirm the aesthetic goodness of a work, due to our reaction to its moral character. E.g.: Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. Is it only an epistemological impossibility to evaluate the goodness of a morally problematic work of art? Back to Stockhausen’s claim Moderate Moralism Are there moral constraints intrinsic to certain artistic genres? Yes, e.g., tragedy. We can extend this idea of the moral constraints within tragedy to art in general . Cognitive moderate moralism From Homer’s poetry and Icelandic sagas, which prescribe the admiration for certain heroic virtues at odds with forgiveness and mercy, up through modern works like Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Jean Genet’s The Balcony, that al least in part show disdain for traditional sexual morality, many successful works, including too Robert Musil’s The Confusions of Young Toerless, or D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, lead us to imagine what we consider is, in real life, ethically undesirable. But we consider this a sign of their success. Cognitive moderate moralism These works place us within the boundaries of that moral outlook and, from that point of view, make us more aware of those boundaries, beyond which one must not go. Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographical studies of flowers, Helmut Newton’s nudes, Degas’ portraits of brothels’ scenes, various works by Klimt, Rodin, Goya, some Shakespearean sonnets, Ovid’s Art of Loving, 1001 Nights, Buñuel’s Belle de Jour etc., are eminently erotic works. Eroticism alone does not undermine any of our shared moral convictions. Cognitive moderate moralism Nor is even pornography, at least some kinds of pornography outside of this valuation. George Bataille’s Story of the Eye, Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses, Pauline Réage’s Story of O, Nicholson Baker’s Vox, some Kama Sutra illustrations, some of Egon Schiele’s nudes, the work of the last Picasso, some of Dali’s works and Hokusai’s woodcuts, among others, are explicitly pornographic and yet they are also artistically worthy. Again, if we turn back to the Greek-Roman world, we can find many representations that are sexually explicit and still valuable as art. In my opinion, any allegedly immoral character of these works is more supposed than real. Some of them, like those of Bataille or Oshima, show us a fictional moral universe that does not contradict the hard core of human rights, or what we can call a minimal ethics. Even more, they have very great epistemic value, since they show a commitment to truth, of re-interpreting good, and so, a very great heuristic value, insofar as they offer moral proposals that allow us either to accept or to reject them. Cognitive moderate moralism Here remains Kendall L. Walton’s well-known notion of the makebelieve (the background for children’s games, and within the artistic field, of mimesis, understood in a wide sense). Had it disappeared, the actual ethical sphere would have dissolved as well, since what would disappear would be the possibility of believing something a fictionally true in a fictional world. This is so given that the events of 9/11 broke the tacit convention of fiction: that the fictional world is a replica of the extra-fictional world, without any possibility of their identification. And moreover, given that these erotic and pornographic works demand such a deep affective-cognitive exercise, I really doubt that they are experienced or treated as pornography, in the popular sense of the word. Cognitive moderate moralism Can immoral works be valuable as art? (D. Jacobson): we can get from them the benefit of understanding moral views different to ours: epistemic value. Christopher Hamilton: we can ourselves be enriched as individuals if we learn to live with the tension between our imagination being captured by a work of art and our moral sense being repelled by it Cognitive immoralism (M. Kieran): the value of a work as art can be highlighted in virtue of its immoral character, because imaginatively experiencing morally defective and problematic cognitive-affective responses and attitudes can deepen one’s understanding and appreciation. Not hypothetical imagination, but dramatic imagination. Cognitive moderate moralism several sorts of positions on artworks concerning their relation to a moral point of view (Noël Carroll): Consequentialism: the belief that artworks have causal, predictable consequences in the moral behavior of the spectators. Propositionalism: the work of art can contain certain propositions explicitly or implicitly, which can be of a moral nature, in such a way that artworks are educational, insofar as they provide new moral (among others) propositions (or in the weaker version, beliefs), that can be false. When the false propositions showed by the artworks affect to moral truths, those works are morally wrong. Cognitive moderate moralism Identificationism: readers and the public in general assume the emotions of the fictional characters. This is properly the Platonic position. So if the emotion showed by the work is morally suspicious, the consequentialist will predict that it will result in an immoral behavior. But the identificationist, if he is consequentialist, will criticize the work, because in all probability, it will produce immoral behaviors. Clarificationism: it consists not of affirming that we can acquire new propositional knowledge from artworks, but rather, of holding that these can deepen our moral understanding, encouraging us to apply the moral knowledge and emotions we already have to specific cases, in order to review and increase our moral knowledge. By practicing our pre-existing moral capacity in response to a work, this work can become an occasion to increase that pre-existing moral understanding. The direction of moral education is not from the work to the world, as suggested by porpositionalist, but from the world to the text. This thesis, though treated as original in Carroll, is in fact one of the interpretations that has historically been given of Aristotle’s ancient and famous but controversial notion of the nature of catharsis. Systemic moderate moralism As the Italian philosopher Evandro Agazzi shows in his account of the relation between science and ethics, when we study the relation between art and morality it is also very suitable to adopt what he labels a systemic point of view. The creation and display of art are exercised within a particular social system, the “artistic system”, which is accompanied by various other systems, whether of social nature or not (economic, religious, political, ecological, moral, etc.). All of these together give rise to what Agazzi calls a “global environment”. Systemic moderate moralism the artistic system receives from the surrounding complex environment different influences in the face of which it manifests a reaction. Some influences are “pressures” that tend to menace the system’s existence, and so it reacts by attempting to reestablish its own inner balance and modifying the environment in a creative way. The artistic system must respond to the demanding inputs from the environment, gaining support and removing obstacles. In other words, the art system is open and adaptive, subjected to a feed-back loop within its environment. Systemic moderate moralism Every important change taking place inside the artistic system produces a series of outputs that modify the environment, which appear a series of feed-backs. These in turn determine changes in the contents of the artistic system, which, we need to see, is not an isolated system. Members of the artistic system must negotiate inputs coming from the environment, attempting to receive the highest support from the environment and avoiding, if possible, obstacles that the environment puts in placed for artistic activity. In this sense, the outputs of the artistic system must be advantageous to the surrounding environment, and, as a consequence, the art system will itself receive support and removal of obstacles from the environment. So, the system should prevent any form of opposition to this beneficial activity. That is, the artistic system tries to get its own targets, but, in order to get them, it must produce outputs which will become inputs for any other system that is capable of offering support or removing environmental opposition. Systemic moderate moralism This system approach from Agazzi leads us to see the problem of moral responsibility in art in terms of optimization: every social system tends to maximize its own essential variables. But such action, for systemic reasons, since there art operates in an open system, must be compatible with the functioning of the other systems. This involves a process of optimization that can be considered to be optimizing the global target of the general system. Systemic moderate moralism Whenever various social systems are interconnected as subsystems of a wider general system, we encounter the problem of optimization. Every particular system tends naturally to maximize its own essential variables, but such maximization is incompatible with the satisfactory functioning of other subsystems, hence, with adequate functioning of the entire system. The question, then, is how to optimize the whole system. In this sort of framework, basic respect for the exigencies of the other systems always constitute, in Agazzi’s terms, a moral obligation for the members of any sub-system. Morality is thus at one and the same time, an exigency of the overall system that matches the individual interest of the artistic sub-system. Systemic moderate moralism Ethics plays a part of this process, because the “moral system” of art is also a part of the global environment. For systemic exigencies, the artistic system must take into account broader moral imperatives, for, if it does not, it will reduce its supports and will provoke opposition to itself from the global environment. The relations between these two systems, thus, is always subject to a process of optimization that is generally valid. This is true without there being a dominant position of any one system above another; they are all in a situation of reciprocal feed-back. Systemic moderate moralism If, for example, we consider that art attacks some basic moral convictions, like the right to life, society will turn away from art and such art will end up destroying itself. If we accept the 9/11 events as art, art will be, without a doubt, submitted to a process of review which can lead to its social extinction as a result of basic subsistence needs of the global system. It is worthwhile to note that this systemic approach is very different from the idea of the “artworld”, which is what is used by Dickie and Danto. The artworld alone might allow in 9/11 to count as art, but not this broader system. Systemic moderate moralism By saying all this, I mean to argue that in order for the global system of our civilization to exist, art must be compatible with minimal moral principles of mankind. But morality is subjected as well to an evolutionary dynamics of systems. Morality then depends on a great number of factors, among which are some particularly relevant to our discussion, namely, the inputs and feed-backs coming from the artistic system. These will have an important and legitimate role, without implying that they can force ethics to renounce to its essential elements, say, determining certain more or less general imperatives for the human behavior. Systemic epistemic moderate moralism Something is not art if it contravenes morality – understanding this in a wide sense, not in the restricted sense of individual morality, but the broader morality by which societies are ruled, and which all have agreed to govern over our common life, the minimal moral code in which all our creeds can have a place, namely what we can name minimal aesthetics, meaning that minimal agreement to define art through a free and rational dialogue Systemic epistemic moderate moralism The position of systemic-epistemic moderate moralism can also explain why art must be censored. To put it another way, and against Danto, art has to be open to public censorship, but not in any usual sense, rather, in the same way in which a scientific theory is open to scientific censorship or a law to sovereign people’s censorship. With all this, we don’t intend to disenfranchise art by tying art to philosophy, as Danto announces in his work The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, nor must we tie art to morality. On the contrary, I have argued here for a necessary systemic consideration of art. Something claimed to be art but which functions to exacerbate its status within the overall system, perhaps by violating core standards of morality as I think 9/11 and some other “artistic” works, will lead straight it to its own extinction.