Introduction: Ethics and the Arts
Paul Macneill2014, Paul Macneill (ed.) Ethics and the Arts. Dordrecht, Heidelberg, New York, and London: Springer
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Abstract
This book sets out to explore many facets of a relationship between ethics and the arts in (almost) all the arts: literature, music, painting, photography, film and documentary, dance and theatre. There is a section dealing with the relationship between ethics and the arts from philosophical perspectives—and a chapter in that section considers the role of the media in framing ethical issues. Ethics and the arts are also explored in relation to bioart—a new mode of art that draws on the biological sciences and techniques for manipulating life forms. The final section considers uses of the arts in relation to science and medicine. In particular: the arts as they are employed within the medical humanities; rhetorical devices in supporting ‘medical progress’; and artists and their works in response to climate change. The contributing authors write from many different disciplinary perspectives and discourses. These include discourses from within the various arts, and the authors’ different philosophical positions and commitments. Many of the authors are both academics and practitioners. Philip Alperson, for example, is both a philosopher and a saxophonist. Debora Diniz is an anthropologist and documentary-film maker. Rachael Swain is a theatre director who drew on her own work for a doctoral dissertation on theatre practice. Both James Thompson and Phillip Zarrilli are university professors and theatre practitioners. Zurr and Catts are artists within an academic research laboratory. The book is inter-disciplinary in approach and composition: drawing on the arts in practice and theory, philosophy (from analytic and European perspectives), and many other disciplines. This, I claim, is one of the books strengths. However, such diversity may attract criticism from purists who stand firmly in any one of the fields covered: which is the fate of many interdisciplinary works. However the collective strength of these chapters is that they relate the arts—including a broad range of current and original work—to aesthetic philosophy, science, medicine, perceptual psychology, cognitive science, and (to some extent) law and politics. This is to take a broad approach to what counts as knowledge by including both cognitive and experiential approaches. A possible outcome is that ethics itself could be re-conceived (at least in part) as aesthetic practice and experience, informed by this wide-ranging theoretical discussion.
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Ethics and the Arts: A Critical Review of the New Moralisms
Paul Macneill (ed.) Ethics and the Arts. Dordrecht, Heidelberg, New York, and London: Springer, 2014
This chapter explores the nature of any relationship between ethics and the arts. At one time, the dominant position in the philosophy of art was that there was no relationship. Aesthetics and ethics were seen as autonomous spheres. The various ‘new moralists’ argue that, in some circumstances, there is a relationship. Noël Carroll and Berys Gaut, for example, argue that moral ‘flaws’ in some works of art may detract from the work’s aesthetic value, while others, such as Daniel Jacobson and Matthew Kieran, counter that a morally reprehensible quality in a work may contribute positively to its aesthetic value. Although the polarities are reversed, both of these positions accept that there is—or may be—a relationship between morality and aesthetics. Others however take a less theoretically based view in acknowledging that there may be a relationship in which a moral quality is seen to add to, or detract, from the aesthetic value a work of art, but that this can only be maintained by a critical assessment of a particular work of art and not by rigid application of theory. This chapter sides with those who are resistant to applying prior moral standards in judging art and puts the view that ethics and aesthetics are independent discourses, although they potentially illuminate one another. The chapter also explores whether moral repugnance, in responding to particular works of art, such as any of Michel Houellebecq’s novels, can be indicative of aesthetic merit or deficiency. It is argued however that no one aspect (moral, affective, or cognitive) can be assumed, in advance, to trump another, and the relative weight given to any of these, is itself a part of a reflection on the aesthetic merit of a particular artwork.
Art’s Rich Contribution to Ethics
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This book is a collection of invited essays on Ethics and the Arts. Most of the chapters were written without each author being familiar with other chapters and there is (unsurprisingly) a range of different approaches taken. Nevertheless, there is also a considerable degree of coherence between the chapters, which I aim to bring out in this concluding chapter. My further aim is to examine the ways (in the particularities of each chapter) in which the arts can, and do, make a major contribution to ethics. As discussed briefly in the Introduction, I consider that the relationship between ethics and the arts is two-way. In this book, ethical concerns are discussed within the arts—but so too is ethics considered from the vantage point of the arts. In this chapter I take up this idea from both angles, in discussing the approaches taken by various authors toward ethics within their artform, as well as in drawing insights from the discussions of various ideas, art theories and practices, and a range of other disciplines, that may offer broader understandings of ethics. There are ethical issues that concern artists and a good many of them have been captured in chapters of this book. This concluding chapter is organised around the ethical issues I have drawn from the preceding chapters and these are represented by the sub-headings below. Included (for example) are: ‘intercultural issues in making art’; and ‘art as an alternative approach to understanding ethics.’ In compiling this book I have been particularly interested in the last of these: drawing understandings about ethics from the arts, and applying these in ways that may enrich our understanding of ethics more broadly.
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This collection responds to a significant increase of judgment and judgmentalism in contemporary television, film, and social media. Especially on television, works whose sole purpose is to generate judgment have multiplied. Judgment pervades contemporary television. The comment sections on online press webpages and blogs, along with social media such as Facebook and Twitter, elicit and propagate our judgments incessantly. The judgment of everyone and everything leaves a permanent digital footprint of that judgment on the judged, but also on those who judge, so that everyone is continuously cast as someone under judgment for what they say or endorse and for how they judge. In viewing we are also watched. In judging we are often also judged. The buyer judges the seller, and vice versa. Our most private relations are rated as transactions. Subjective judgment has left the internal realm of our own super-egos and instead is handed out in a public manner, forever archived in verdicts on screens. The rise of subjective judgment directs all areas of public and private life, at work and at leisure, from popular culture to academia. Judgment and competition are made to look as though they are synonymous.
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