To what extent is good art determined by morality?

It was perfectly true. The portrait had altered.

As he often remembered afterwards, and always with no small wonder, he found himself at first gazing at the portrait with a feeling of almost scientific interest. That such a change should have taken place was incredible to him. And yet it was a fact. Was there some subtle affinity between the chemical atoms, that shaped themselves into form and colour on the canvas, and the soul that was within him? Could it be that what the soul thought, they realised? – that what it dreamed, they made true? Or was therefore some other, more terrible reason? He shuddered, and felt afraid, and , going back the couch, lay there, gazing at the picture in sickened horror.

One thing, however, he felt that it had done for him. It made him conscious of how unjust, how cruel, he had been to Sibyl Vane.

In this extract from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, Dorian has just learned that Sibyl Vane, whom he abandoned though she loved him, committed suicide because of his immoral action. There are two important aspects of this extract. Firstly, “it was perfectly true. The portrait had altered.” Wilde creates, though this assured tone of “perfectly true”, a direct causal link between the morality of Dorian’s actions and the portrait. Secondly, the portrait has actively “made him conscious of how unjust, how cruel he had been”; it caused how he “shuddered, and felt afraid”. Wilde thus establishes a second direct causal link: the link between the contents of the portrait and Dorian’s aesthetic judgment of that portrait. Both of these create a link between the moral worth of what the artwork depicts and its aesthetic value. The question of whether good art – art with aesthetic beauty and value – is determined by the moral worth of its contents thus arises. Though in this stimulus Wilde seems to suggest that good art is determined by morality, this is at odds with his preface to the novel and the conclusion of this essay: that “there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book”, meaning that good art isn’t determined by morality.

Rooting from Plato’s aesthetics, moralist arguments hold that artistic value is inseparable from morality. In the Phaedrus, Plato speaks of being “transported with the recollection of the true beauty” Here, Plato argues that when we see something beautiful we remember of the true form of beauty, in a process called anamnesis. Art, by contrast, is not a Form and can only exist in the doxa because it is mimetic. Doxa is not knowledge but malleable, subjective opinion – a substitute for real knowledge. Plato distinguishes between the true beauty and artistic beauty, arguing that “theatre-lovers…are incapable of seeing and delighting in the essential nature of beauty itself”. Artworks cannot be truly beautiful because they cannot contain the Form of beauty. For Plato, external reality is an impression of the realm of Forms and by virtue of being an impression has less truth. Art entertains the process of mimesis – meaning most accurately an imitation. Art is thus deliberate imitation of external reality, and therefore a deliberate “double imitation” of Formal reality. Because art is this “double imitation” it can only be in the doxa. Art therefore deliberately puts the viewer into the realm of doxa and thus deliberately deceives the viewer: an immoral act. Art as a form is therefore inextricably linked with its immorality, as it deliberately deceives the viewer. Plato judges the morality of art with reference to how they deceive their viewers – whilst poetry is the most immoral because of how it aims to deceive in its fictive narrative, statues which attempt to copy external reality at their best are less immoral because they aim to give accurate knowledge of external reality.

The first potential issue with Plato’s argument is that he makes the assumption that the doxa, or the opposite of knowledge and truth is necessarily immoral. Plato’s explanation is that to deliberately move someone away from truth is against their nature as rational beings who want to seek the truth. Hence, rationality underpins all of Plato’s aesthetics; beauty is rational whilst art is irrational. David Hume argues against this rationalisation of beauty. Instead, Hume argues that in aesthetic judgment, “reason is perfectly inert”. Hume argues that reason is involved in the discovery of a type of knowledge involving truth or falsehood, but our passions, volitions, and feelings are not true or false knowledge. Reason has therefore no weight in aesthetic judgment. Though Plato may argue that rationality is still necessary for making aesthetic and moral judgments, Hume admits that reason is “at least requisite” to aesthetic judgment. However, this doesn’t entail that the entirety of making aesthetic judgments revolves around rationality. This is convincing by experience – just as Dorian’s reaction to his portrait is mostly made significant because of his emotional reaction, lots of art only makes sense if we form emotional connections to the characters like King Lear.  However, all this is perhaps only strengthens Plato’s argument – he might respond that because art cannot be understood purely through reason, it is immoral. But, the unfounded and incessant prioritisation of reason over emotion in Plato’s philosophy resurfaces, and this prioritisation is incoherent with the nature of art. Therefore, the undercurrent assumption in Plato’s argument that art and beauty must be viewed on rational, knowledge-seeking grounds is what undoes makes Hume’s argument the more convincing.

However, this is all under the first interpretation of Plato’s definition of “mimesis”. Moralists might dismiss this entire criticism of Plato’s argument on the grounds that Plato did not mean “imitation” but “impersonation”. Indeed, Plato argues that a poet creating a character is an “assimilation of himself to another… the imitation of the person whose character he assumes”. It might therefore be this aspect of identification that Plato deems morally dubious, the likening of the self to an other. Plato’s argument becomes a double-edged sword; if we reject the argument that mimesis makes art immoral, Plato still argues that art is immoral because it leads to the identification of the self to an other. However, Plato’s argument is still unpersuasive, as there are “scarcely any grounds for Plato’s anxieties about identification”. As Carroll points out, if actors were trying identifying with characters they were playing, then they wouldn’t be able to perform their learned lines and rehearsed actions. This reveals to the most deep-running and unjustified assumption in Plato’s aesthetics – that art, including in the examination of its relation to morality, should be judged for its consequences. It is clear that Plato values not art not qua art, and in doing so makes both of the facets of his argument regarding the morality of art not based on art itself, but its effects, which is an unjustifiable leap of logic.

Although Plato’s version of moralism might seem unpersuasive, its influence has left potentially more persuasive arguments in favour of art’s value being determined by morality. Ethicism, defended by Berys Gaut, isn’t as absolutist as Plato, and therefore perhaps promises to be more persuasive. As Gaut explains, “the ethicist principle is a pro tanto one: it holds that a work is aesthetically meritorious (or defective) insofar as it manifests ethically admirable (or reprehensible) attitudes.” Gaut’s principal argument is the “merited-response argument”. He argues that works of art prescribe the imagining of certain events through the plot, but that it does not follow that it succeeds in making this response merited. The failure of an artwork to prescribe a response, is a failure intrinsic to the work of art, and is thus an aesthetic defect on the cognitive-affective view of art. If the work does make its response merited, because it is unethical, then it is an aesthetic default.

The argument seems to have some promise, as it attempts to justify its consequentialism by linking it to the intrinsic value of art, hence linking aesthetics and morality qua art. It might be argued that Gaut commits a fallacy of equivocation, by starting with a premise about ethical merit and then equivocating that to aesthetic merit. However, this doesn’t really occur in Gaut’s argumentation, because ethical character contributing to the aesthetic judgment of an artwork doesn’t equivocate the two. Ethicism suggests that in artwork, both aesthetic and moral considerations matter, however that doesn’t mean that they are equivalent. The principal weakness of the argument is that it ignores the role of the experiencer and of the artist. If the response that the response that a work prescribes is not merited, it does not necessarily follow that the artwork itself is at fault. Gaut’s language of ‘merited’ implies that the experiencer if art is always correct in his aesthetic judgment and therefore that when the prescribed response is not achieved it must be the artist’s or the artwork’s fault. It isn’t the artwork’s fault that Dorian goes on to morally degenerate after viewing the portrait, and eventually kill Basil Hallward. Although Gaut attempts to link the consequences of experiencing art to the intrinsic value of art, ultimately this insufficiently justified consequentialism is still there. Therefore, by ignoring the possibility that a difference in aesthetic taste is not made by the artwork but the one experiencing the artwork, Gaut’s ethicism isn’t very convincing.

By contrast, autonomism holds that one mustn’t necessarily consider art’s aesthetic value alongside its moral one. Underpinning this is Kant’s argument that “beauty is the symbol of the morally good”.

Symbolic representation is the presentation of a priori concepts of reason not directly instantiated in the phenomenal realm. By being symbolic, beauty “does not find itself subjected to a heteronomy of laws of experience”. Both the liberating effect of beauty and the way in which we look at it in a disinterested way make aesthetic judgments closely analogous to moral judgments. By linking aesthetics and morality in the judgments made rather than the objects themselves, Kant’s argument is strengthened by how it does not thereby impose morality on art itself, whilst maintaining that link between aesthetics and morality. For Kant, aesthetic experience serves to prepare us to be more morally good agents in that “the beautiful prepares us to love something…without interest”. For Kant, art is not beautiful because it is moral, but vice versa.

It might be argued that this implies that art serves a purpose and therefore has the instrumental value of improving us as moral agents. Not only is this perhaps problematic in itself, but also the existence of “morally reprehensible asthetes” such as Dorian serve as potential counterexamples to Kant’s argument. However, Kant stresses that beauty is its own end and is moral because of this, making the first objection unpersuasive. Moreover, because symbolic representation is indirect, the fact that people both love beauty in art and are morally reprehensible is more of a judgment on the person rather than the link between art and morality. More problematically, it could be argued that if we reject Plato or Gaut’s argument on the basis that their consequentialism isn’t justified, we must also reject Kant’s argument because of how it focuses on one’s judgment of art and not art itself. The way in which Kant argues that beauty of any phenomenal object lies not in the object itself but in the affective experience between the object and the experiencer. However, whereas the implication of Plato’s and Gaut’s arguments limit aesthetic value to that of the moral, Kant doesn’t go as far. Kant ensures that aesthetic value is independent of moral value in the art itself, which is more convincing because it allows art to maintain its intrinsic value. Nevertheless, whilst Kant’s argument is persuasive in and of itself, it might be inapplicable to art. This is because, unlike when we view natural beauty, we are conscious of a determinate purpose of the artist to please us, and therefore arguably cannot view art as disinterestedly. It is very difficult to suggest that this difference does not exist, but something having a purpose doesn’t entail that we cannot view it disinterestedly. Though this is perhaps not strictly Kant’s argument, it seems the most persuasive interpretation of it with regard to art.

In conclusion, the moralist and ethicist positions suffer from the common assumption that art has instrumental value, which is problematic because they end up imposing moral judgments not on art itself, but on its effects. If we accept that cause and effect, though undeniably linked, are separate, we must separate art and its effects, and thereby dismiss such positions. Kant’s argument does not suffer from this fallacy, and is the most convincing position because of how it links moral and ethical judgment while exacerbating how art is still valuable in and of itself. Art, while linked in judgment to morality, is therefore not determined by it.

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