Abstract
Noël Carroll’s (“Moderate Moralism”) conceptual framework includes four positions: radical autonomism, moderate autonomism, moderate moralism, and radical moralism. Alessandro Giovanelli (“The Ethical Criticism of Art: A New Mapping of the Territory”) argues that the radical positions, as Carroll defines them, have no modern day adherents. Therefore, the framework should be adapted such that we can see interestingly new distinctions. On Giovanelli’s new framework Carroll’s account is a moderate autonomist view. In this paper I adopt Giovanelli’s framework and raise a different objection to Carroll’s account. I argue that Carroll’s account possesses a branching structure, since on this account moral and aesthetic criticism are not linearly related. Because of this structure, Carroll’s theory faces a dilemma: it’s either self-undermining or consistent with moderate autonomism, even in his own framework. Drawing on Kendall Walton’s (“Categories of Art”) notion of categories of art, I provide an account that is both non-branching and moderate moralist in Giovanelli’s framework. It’s non-branching because moral criticism bears a linear causal relation to aesthetic criticism.
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Notes
For discussions of imaginative resistance, see Tamar Gendler, “The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance.” The Journal of Philosophy, 97, 2 (2000), pp. 55–81; “Imaginative Resistance Revisited,” in The Architecture of the Imagination, ed. Shaun Nichols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), pp. 149–174; Derek Matravers, “Fictional Assent and the (So-called) ‘Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance’,” in Imagination, Philosophy, and the Arts, ed. Matthew Kieran and Dominic Lopes. (NY: Routledge, 2003), pp. 90–105; Richard Moran, “The Expression of Feeling in Imagination,” Philosophical Review 103 (1994), pp. 75–106; Kendall Walton (1994) “Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society supp. 68 (1994), pp. 27–50; On the (So-called) Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance,” in The Architecture of the Imagination, ed. Shaun Nichols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), pp. 137–148; Brian Weatherson, “Morality, Fiction, and Possibility,” Philosopher’s Imprint, Vol. 4, No. 3 (2004), pp. 1–27; and Stephen Yablo, “Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda,” in Conceivability and Possibility, ed. Tamar Gendler and John Hawthorne. (NY: Oxford University Press), pp. 441–492.
For the most prominent versions of moralism, see Noël Carroll, “Moderate Moralism,” British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 36, no. 3 (1996), pp. 223–238; “Moderate Moralism Versus Moderate Autonomism,” British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 38, no. 4 (1998), pp. 419–424; Berys Gaut, “The Ethical Criticism of Art,” in Aesthetics and Ethics, ed. Jerrold Levinson. (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 182–203; and Robert Stecker, “The Interaction of Ethical and Aesthetic Value,” British Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 45, No. 2 (2005), pp. 138–50.
For a modern version of autonomism, see James C. Anderson and Jeffrey T. Dean, “Moderate Autonomism,” British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 38, no. 2 (1998), pp. 150–166.
I borrow the description of valence consistency from Stephanie Patridge, “Moral Vices as Artistic Virtues: Eugene Onegin and Alice,” Philosophia, Vol. 36 (2008), pp. 181–293.
For the most prominent versions of immoralism, see Daniel Jacobson, “In Praise of Immoral Art,” Philosophical Topics Vol. 25 (1997), pp. 155–189 and Matthew Kieran, “Forbidden Knowledge: The Challenge of Immoralism,” in Art and Morality, ed. Jose Bermudez and Sebastian Gardner. (NY: Routledge, 2006), pp. 56–73.
Carroll, “Moderate Moralism,” p. 231.
Giovanelli, “The Ethical Criticism of Art,” p. 122.
Ibid., p. 122.
Ibid., p. 122.
Of course, if we wanted, we could include Carroll’s radical positions in this framework—so that we might have radical radical autonomism and radical radical moralism—in order to account for these conceptual possibilities as well. But if Giovanelli’s right that no one actually adopts these positions in the current debate, there would be no advantage to doing so.
Giovanelli, “The Ethical Criticism of Art,” p. 124.
Technically speaking, some narratives are not read in the literal sense. I think, though, there is a sense of “read” that is appropriate for viewing films and listening to lyrical music. Thus I use “reader” in this sense.
Carroll, “Moderate Moralism,” p. 234.
Carroll discusses this issue in his book On Criticism (New York: Routledge, 2009, pp. 53–65) where he distinguishes “success value,”—i.e., “whether or not the artist has succeeded in achieving her ends”—and “reception value”—“whether or not the work occasions valuable experiences.” (p. 53) There he argues that the job of the critic is to make evaluations vis-à-vis success value, rather than reception value, giving several reasons. But these reasons are marshaled against the theorist who claims that all criticism should be aimed at maximizing reception value. As I am not making that strong claim here, the reasons he gives aren’t sufficient to refute the suggestion that sometimes a work is legitimately valued more highly precisely because of unachieved artistic aims.
John Searle, Mind, Language, and Society: Philosophy in the Real World (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 123. For a discussion of this relation in connection to properties of artworks, see Nicholas Wolterstorff, Works and Worlds of Art (New York: Clarendon Press, 1980).
The relation might go in the other direction—from the aesthetic to the moral—as well. See Stecker, “The Interaction of Ethical and Aesthetic Value.”
See Anderson and Dean, “Moderate Autonomism.”
Ibid., pp. 156–157.
Ibid., p. 157.
Carroll, “Moderate Moralism Versus Moderate Autonomism,” p. 423.
Carroll, “Moderate Moralism,” p. 232.
Ibid., p. 339, emphasis in original.
Ibid., p. 352.
This doesn’t preclude the possibility that we perform moral criticism when we find there to be no moral defect.
One might argue that the appropriate relation isn’t supervenience or reduction, but emergence. In this case narrative perspective might result from a constellation of certain narrative properties, which would eliminate the need to seek perspectives of narrative figures. I worry, however, that this strategy just replaces the mystery of narrative perspective with the (deeper) mystery of emergent narrative properties.
This would also give us a way to avoid the question discussed in narrative theory literature about whether narratives with transparent narrators—i.e., narratives with no overt self-reference to a narrator—are really narrated at all. Many argue that as narratives are representations, we presume a representer. Thus, even in those narratives with seemingly no narrator, we must presume one nonetheless. But if what I suggest is correct, in these cases we have an implied narrator (because there is always an implied narrator) but we don’t have an actual narrator.
I take the term from Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), but I am using it slightly differently.
Of course, if we reject any of (a)–(c), then we aren’t compelled to posit all three roles.
Walton, Categories, p. 359
Ibid., p. 175.
See Clive Bell, Art (New York: Stokes, 1914), pp. 84–85.
References
Davies, D. (2007). Aesthetics and Literature (p. 174). London: Continuum.
Genette, G. (1980). Narrative Discourse. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Giovanelli, A. (2007). The Ethical Criticism of Art: a new mapping of the territory. Philosophia, 35, 117–127.
Walton, K. (1970). Categories of Art. The Philosophical Review, 79(3), 334–367.
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Clifton, S. Non-Branching Moderate Moralism. Philosophia 42, 95–111 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-013-9488-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-013-9488-4