Art and Ethics 3 - Moralism

hello YouTube today we're going to look at moralism there are two more illicit of views worth considering moderate moralism which holds that a moral defect is sometimes an aesthetic defect and ethic ISM which holds that a moral defect is always an aesthetic defect since moderate moralism is the weaker claim we'll focus on that one first obviously the arguments for modern moralism can be used to support ethic ISM although they need to be supplemented with other considerations first there's what I'm calling the argument from artistic practice this is just the point that if we take a look at how art is actually been practiced throughout human history it's heavily bound up with moral concerns there are artworks that are propaganda that tried to agitate people think of wartime art or the Socialist Realist art of the Soviet Union many artworks tries to challenge the status quo think of feminist novels or anti-war songs consider the 1960s with the counterculture movement and all the music that was intertwined with the moral ideals of that movement further we've often seen art being used as a tool of moral insight we think that by engaging with plays or whatever by reflecting on moral problems that may emerge in the narrative we can develop a greater moral sensitivity so there are many many examples of art where it almost seems to miss the point to ignore ethics if we consider the practice of art we see the artists often have the goal of communicating some moral message now there are two important difficulties with this argument first it rests it rests on a hidden assumption which goes something like if something is among them the goals that artists have in creating art then that thing is an object of aesthetic value the idea is we look at artistic practice and consider how art is actually being produced and the sort of goals artists might have in mind in producing art and we see that a central goal is and moral education or moral insight the trouble is that this assumption is obviously wrong almost all artists have the goal of making money but monetary considerations economic considerations have no bearing whatsoever on the aesthetic value of an work in fact I mean for many artworks the central goal of the creative might have been to make money abandon might release an album just because they're running out of money so they've got a ban something out to get the cash rolling in I think the Grateful Dead often saw themselves as being basically a live band and they released albums just to get a bit more money on the side but this has no influence on the aesthetic value of those albums the second problem is that we can recognize moral insights or the moral perspective that an artwork might promote without accepting it in any sense what's aesthetically relevant is how well the artwork communicates its message it doesn't matter so much whether we agree or disagree with it we can say what this argument from artistic practice shows is that we have to consider the messages that our works communicate we can answer questions like does it communicate its message effectively but the argument doesn't entail that if we pass any moral judgments about these messages these judgments have to influence our judgments of aesthetic value so that's maybe not such a successful argument a second argument perhaps more powerful comes from Noel Carroll who is the main exponent of moderate moralism Carroll's argument begins with the point that artworks are always incomplete when you read a novel or watch your film there will always be things left out and you'll have to fill in the gaps many of these things are pretty trivial so if you're if you watch an action movie you simply assume that the characters have bodies reasonably like your own so it makes sense that when the henchman gets shot in the chest he falls down and dies we assume that the henchman has a heart in his chest and that his heart is necessary for survival but if he didn't assume that then that wouldn't really make much sense and of course in a fiction could change that there's no necessary reason why they would have to have bodies like our own but you just have to kind of make these assumptions there's all sorts of assumptions you have to make when you watch a film read a book or whatever now artworks also presuppose particular emotional responses in order to comprehend the artwork properly we have to have certain emotional responses to it understand why there's sad music and so on when the hero dies this needs to be somebody we once felt some admiration for but artworks can fail to prevail provide the basis for such responses Carol gives the example of a superhero film in which the superhero is cornered by a 90-pound weakling you won't feel any suspense there the scene in an important sense it doesn't even make sense a 90-pound weakling is no threat to a superhero assuming the point of the scene is to generate suspense the scene has failed on its own terms this would be a non-controversial case of an aesthetic defects if the filmmakers haven't made their villains threatening enough to generate suspense we'd all agree that the film would be aesthetically defective for that reason so the next point is that many emotional responses depend on moral judgments feeling pity for somebody depends on the judgement that some wrong has been done to them that they don't deserve so consider a tragedy with a morally repugnant hero bad things happen to this hero and the plays clearly trying to evoke sympathy for him but he's a horrible person imagine that he's a misogynist racist he's a Nazi it goes around raping and murdering people you've pretty funny pretty difficult to feel sympathy for that for that person or consider humor somebody might make a very clever funny joke but this joke is at the expense of an eight-year-old child is dying of cancer a lot of people would feel a kind of moral disapproval of that joke that would block their ability to laugh at it I'll give a real-life example of this actually my young my granddad has Alzheimer's and for Christmas one year my dad bought him some special cheese now our granddad was very pleased with his present and my dad said something like something like good well great in a few days you'll have forgotten about this so I can just get you that present every time now that kind of a humor is acceptable to us but it wouldn't be for many people if it was a friend rather than a family member who who had that disease he probably wouldn't have made that joke so summing up some artworks intend for the audience to have particular emotional responses but our ability to have certain emotional responses depends on making moral judgments we won't feel pity for somebody with repulsive we we won't laugh at a joke that we find morally bad but some people won't anyway it follows that if an artwork is morally defective the audience may be unable to respond in the way intended and the reason they're unable to respond is due to the moral defects of the work take the tragedy with the hero who's you know some horrible rapist the moral defect with this artwork is that it presents a rapist as somebody to admire and pity and that's morally wrong the aesthetic defect is that we don't feel any admiration or pity for him what makes the work morally bad also reduces its aesthetic value so we can formulate Carroll's argument a bit like this premise one if an artwork aims to provoke some response but the artwork fails to provoke that response then the artwork is aesthetically defective to some responses presuppose particular moral attitudes pity for the tragic hero presupposes that we don't find him morally repugnant so if an artwork is morally defective it may try but fail due to its moral defects to provoke a particular response so moral defects can be aesthetic defects there's nothing unusual or exotic about this point there are many ways an artwork might fail to provoke a response being morally defective is just one cause of failure among many and also note that this argument doesn't entail that a moral defect is always an aesthetic effect there are cases where a moral defect doesn't get in the way of the response so I don't know maybe like a stereotypical portrayal of a character that has no impact on the emotional responses the work is designed to elicit it could just be like a really minor character who for whatever reason is portrayed in a racist way or something so this argument doesn't commit Carroll to the claim of ethic is immoral defect is always an aesthetic defect okay some problems for this argument first we can have a reaction and feel that the reaction is morally problematic so it may not be true that some reactions presuppose particular moral attitudes you watch a tragedy with an awful hero do your moral objections to the tragedy actually prevent you feeling pity for the hero I found that very questionable it seems to me that you can have emotional responses in spite of your better judgment as it were you can think to yourself I really shouldn't be feeling pity for this person but I am anyway so possibly then the argument is a bit problematic for that reason we can have with it maybe reactions don't really presuppose particular moral attitudes I think this replying doesn't doesn't really work it ignores the fact that an important class of responses we have to what works at our meta responses so Susan Fagan I think that's how you pronounce our name through a distinction between direct responses and the meta responses imagine you see a child falling off a bike this might make you laugh assuming he doesn't hurt himself really badly or whatever you might find it quite amusing this is a direct response you may also experience a response to this response you may think it was bad of you to find amusement in the child's misfortune so you feel guilty the guilt is a meta response it's a response to your direct response of amusement so we have direct responses and we have responses to these responses which are meta responses with this distinction in mind we can see that summer sponsors arguably do presuppose particular moral attitudes when you watch a tragedy it's not just that you feel admiration and pity for the hero you should also feel good about feeling admiration and pity for the hero this is one of the things that tragedies are supposed to do we're not just supposed to feel pity we're supposed to feel good about feeling pity tragedy draws my attention to my own moral attitudes it lets me see that I'm sensitive I'm the sort of person who feels pity when bad things happen to good people and furthermore the tragedy itself has the same sort of attitude it's designed to elicit pity many other people watching the tragedy will feel pity as well so it provokes a sense of unity and brotherhood with others tragedy reminds us of our common humanity and so on Susan Fagan thinks that these kinds of meta responses are extremely important to be honest I don't think they play much of a role in my own way actions to fictions but evidently these are among the responses a tragedy could aim to provoke and arguably you couldn't have those feelings of unity of common humanity you couldn't feel good about your responses if you think that they're morally wrong so as long as we're clear about what kinds of responses we have in mind it seems entirely plausible to me that some responses do depend on having particular moral attitudes okay second something Carroll's argument possibly overlooks is that very often when we engage with fictions we adopt a pretense we will often root for the villains we may pretend to have a different moral outlook to what we actually have when I watch Game of Thrones I root the characters who are totally self-interested and who are intelligent enough and strong enough to succeed Tywin Lannister and Petyr Baelish are among my favorites they are cunning manipulative intelligent and extremely dangerous also like Ramsay Bolton a lot as well although he's maybe a bit too impulsive the point is that granting some responses presuppose particular moral attitudes I can just adopt those attitudes as a pretense I don't have to genuinely hold those attitudes again this reply doesn't really work the trouble is that it's very questionable whether we can adopt a presence towards just anything suppose we're watching an erotic thriller designed to have many sexually arousing scenes and suppose that one of these scenes produces moral revulsion because say it depicts rape well rape is not the sort of thing you should be presenting as erratically appealing can you adopt a pretense and look past your moral revulsion in this case I suspect that many people wouldn't be able to to the extent that this scene fails to turn you on it's aesthetically defective and it fails to turn you on because it's morally bad so you know we could multiply examples of this as well I mean I've said that I often root for the villains but even I have limits on who I can root for well they're not necessarily because they're too bad but some villains are just idiots you know I can I can root for Tywin Lannister but I can't root my Joffrey he's a if not work required me to root for someone like Joffrey I'm not sure I'd be able to but the basic point here is that even if we granted the claim about about adopting a pretense there are some cases where we where we just can't do this so it seems that Carole's argument stands ok the main problem with this argument premise 1 says that if not work tries but fails to provoke a particular response then it is for that reason aesthetically defective premise 3 says that if an artwork is morally defective it may try but fail to provoked a particular response the obvious question here is whose responses count I mean there are all sorts of reasons people might fail to have the response that an artwork a tries to provoke for instance if they fall asleep for half the film they'll probably fail to engage properly with the rest of it that's not necessarily the film's fault that wouldn't be an aesthetic defect in the film somebody who tries to read a book in a language they have only a basic grasp of will probably not get much out of the book again that's not an aesthetic defect in the book so the Carole's argument to work we need to suppose that an artwork is morally defective is aesthetically defective if it fails to provoke the response in an ideal audience we have to imagine an audience of people best place to judge the work people who are reasonably intelligent who understand the conventions of the genre who are attuned to the different elements of the artwork and so on there are I think many problems with this kind of appeal but the main one is this if we don't consider the moral case the tragedy that presents a racist misogynist Nazi as a hero may not have been designed to elicit sympathy from audiences like us we could say that insofar as we're not racists we can't take the artwork on its own terms so we're not best placed to judge it aesthetically the moral defects of an artwork will prevent it from provoking the right response only if we agree that they are moral defects so the ideal audience to judge a particular artwork seems to be the audience who share the perspective the artwork but in that case a moral defect won't be an aesthetic defect because the moral defect won't prevent the ideal audience from having the right responses it seems the audience shares that morally defective perspective now Carroll responds to this problem by saying that an idea that being an ideal audience involves being an ideally morally sensitive audience and by morally sensitive audience he means an audience with the right moral views so I guess for Carroll that means egalitarian liberal feminist etc views I'm not sure about that but I think that you know that Carroll is sort of on the left on the liberal sort of side now if a tragedy fails to provoke pity for the protagonist among the morally sensitive audience it is thereby aesthetically defective that's Carole's proposal the primary problem with this is that it simply begs the question of course a morally sensitive audience will not be motivated by Nazi propaganda like triumph of the will of course a morally sensitive audience will not pity the the rapists who is presented as a hero in the tragedy but why should the value of an artwork be judged against a morally sensitive audience why is this the audience whose opinions count this is a good method of discerning aesthetic value only if we presuppose moralism only if we presuppose that moral defects are aesthetic defects but if if you're an autonomist or a think if you're just egg gnostic about the issue surely you'd say that triumph of the whale should be judged against the audience it was intended for people attracted to Nazism so I don't think that that argument is very persuasive okay well those were a couple of arguments for moderate moralism let's consider some arguments for ethic ISM the view that moral defect is always an aesthetic defect and moral virtue is always an aesthetic virtue ethic is amiss being defended most forcefully by Baris Gort so we'll focus on his work first it's worth clarifying exactly what ethic ISM says there's an immediate objection we might raise to ethic ISM take a film that you like say Point Break Point Break is a wonderful film the original version anywhere I've not seen the remake so imagine that at the beginning and end of Point Break before the credit sequences a bunch of statements about morality were displayed on the screen statements have expressed morally good attitudes for instance equality is good Hitler was evil and so on this would make the film morally better well here's the worry if a moral virtue is always an aesthetic virtue then we have to say that displaying these statements is an aesthetic virtue in which case it seems that we can improve the aesthetic value of any particular artwork simply by adding morally virtuous statements to it put them at the end of the book at the end of the album at the end of the film so they're gonna get in the way of the rest of what's going on just just add them there and by doing that you'll have made an aesthetically better artwork this is ridiculous most artworks would clearly be made worse if you did that now what the ethicist would say to this is that something that improves aesthetic value in one respect can reduce it in another respect and I think this is perfectly reasonable imagine that instead of adding these statements to the end of Point Break we added ten beautiful photographs of mountains these photos have all sorts of aesthetic virtues striking color sophisticated compositions but they are totally out of place in the context of the rest of the film Point Break would have been a worse film if it had random photos of mountains at the end even though those photos may have had many aesthetic virtues so the ethicist does not claim that if an artwork is morally better it is therefore aesthetically better overall making an artwork morally better may make it aesthetically worse overall the claim is simply that if an artwork is morally better it is in fact a particular respect aesthetically better so that is important to bear in mind that we don't sort of attribute too strong a claim to the ethicist here okay now bear escort's central argument is the merited response argument and this is quite similar to Carole's argument it goes like this some works commend certain responses to the audience if a response is unethical it is unmerited in other words we have a kind of overriding reason not to have that response we shouldn't have that response premise three if an artwork commends an unmerited response it is in this respect aesthetically flawed we have a reason an overriding reason not to respond in the way commended by the artwork it is in this respect us let it be flawed so a moral flaw is an aesthetic flaw a couple of comments then so on premise two can responses beyond ethical well yes it seems I can if you admire a white supremacist to religious black people would probably say that your response is unethical promise three a response can be unmerited for many reasons a comedy that commends amusement but doesn't merit it perhaps due to poor timing is in this respect aesthetically flawed a tragedy that commends admiration for a morally repugnant character for sorry a tragedy that commends admiration for a character that doesn't merit to do too bad characterization or bad acting is aesthetically flawed similarly a tragedy that commends admiration for a character that doesn't merit it due to moral flaws is aesthetically flawed trying to be commends that we admire the racist misogynist Nazi but this would be morally wrong and it's being morally wrong provides a sort of overriding reason not to have that response the response elaboration is unmerited a notice incidentally that an exactly parallel argument leads to the conclusion that moral virtues are aesthetic virtues if a response is ethical it is in that respect merited if an artwork commends a merited response it is in that respect aesthetically good so a moral virtue is an aesthetic virtue now although this argument is similar to Carroll's argument it does kind of make a stronger claim Carroll's argument suggests that artworks can fail on their own terms in virtue of a state of moral defects so the artwork commends a response but we don't feel the response due to its moral repugnance on gort's argument we may have the response or we may not it doesn't matter the moral repugnance of the response commended by the work counts as an aesthetic defect whether or not we actually have the response so notice that one of the main fits of gort's argument is that he doesn't need to appeal to ideal audience is there anything like that all that matters for courts argument is that the artwork commends an amoral response it's irrelevant whether or not anybody has the response okay so in some ways this is a stronger argument than Carol's but there is still a big problem with it the problem is this if a response is immoral it will evidently be unmerited in some sense but isn't it unmerited in a way that is relevant to aesthetic evaluation I mean recall one of the points I made in the first video I think in the introduction that jokes can be funny precisely because they're amoral can't there be aesthetically merited responses when a morally unmerited Daniel Jacobson take takes this line in a bit more detail he says look there are various sensors in which we might say a response is unmerited in one sense we can say that a response is unmerited because it presupposes that the object or event to which it is directed has properties it doesn't actually have consider mV I might envy a person's life and this presupposes that his life is better than mine in certain relevant respects perhaps I assume that he's happier or richer or whatever if I'm wrong about this and his life isn't better than mine then my Envy is unmerited Jacobson says that when an emotion is unmerited in this sense it is unwarranted his life does not warrant my Envy because it doesn't have the properties that I presuppose it has on the other hand suppose that his life really is better than mine so my Envy is warranted we still may say that the envy is unmerited for other reasons we might say that Envy is pointless it's better to focus on improving yourself rather than getting hung up about the fact that some people have it better than you we might think envy is myopic in a certain sense bearing in mind the millions of people in the world are literally starving perhaps there's something base and vicious it wants him to trade your perfectly comfortable existence for a slightly more comfortable existence another example is anger suppose you've devoted yourself to Zen Buddhism and we spend your time meditating and try to overcome negative emotions one day you're wrong by someone they defraud you out of a large amount of money their action clearly warrants anger their action was unjust you're the victim but if you're committed to Zen Buddhism you'll have very good reasons not to become angry at this part of what that religion involves is becoming accepting of all events even bad ones so what all this suggests is that whether or not a response is unwarranted depends on the properties of the event that the response is directed at but it may be unmerited for other reasons and there are many such reasons it could be imprudent there are some people like your boss at work it's a bad idea to get angry with even if their behavior warrants it or it may be unmerited because it's immoral envy is perhaps an example of this or finding amusement in a racist joke or admiring and pitying a repugnant hero in a tragedy so this distinct in mine let's reconsider the merited response argument here it is what does the word unmerited mean in this argument what if it means unwarranted then it looks like premise 3 here is probably okay remember to say that a response is unwarranted is to say that the response presupposes that the object or event to which is directed has properties it doesn't really have we can imagine an artwork trying to get us to feel fear but where there's nothing scary about the thing we're being asked to be afraid of like you know the superhero versus the 90-pound weakling so pros three arguably works if not work commends an unwarranted response it is in this respect aesthetically flawed but now premise two is just wrong the fact that response is unethical doesn't mean it's unwanted envying the person whose life is better than yours may be morally questionable but given the nature of envy it's totally warranted on the other hand suppose we interpret unmerited to mean ethically unmerited well then premise two is fine it's it's trivially true but premise three just begs the question you'll only accept the premise if an artwork commends an unethically unmerited response it is in this respect aesthetically flawed if you already accept ethic ISM so the the merited response argument fails and that broadly speaking is is Daniel Jacobson's objection I think it's I think it's a reasonably persuasive objection a second argument from Baris Court is the moral Beauty argument this is essentially just the straightforward claim that moral value has in general aesthetic value the morally virtuous is in general aesthetically beautiful and the morally bad is in general aesthetically ugly so the fact that the moral value of artworks affects their aesthetic value is just one instance of this now in defense of this claim got points out that we often describe people as being beautiful or ugly in terms of their character or personality or attitudes and these are clearly moral judgments now it seems it if people are good morally then they become aesthetically more beautiful and there's a long tradition of this kind of language you've talked of beauties of the soul I'll put it in more modern terms the beauties of the mind just like how we can aesthetically evaluate a person as wit a person's sense of humor I think it's plausible to say that person who has a good sense of humor it was fun to be around is in that respect more aesthetically appealing than somebody who's boring an anti-social so there's more to beauty than just how a person looks masya Eaton gives an interesting analogy on this point imagine you see a beautiful plant its stem and petioles have lovely graceful curves its leaves have unusual shapes and striking colors but then you learn that this plant is in fact it's a very destructive weed it's a non-native species that has caused severe ecological problems in the area would this affect our judgment of how beautiful is I mean it still looks very beautiful its surface properties are just as beautiful but for many people when they learn more about this plan about how destructive it is that would reduce their aesthetic appreciation of it so the moral Beauty argument suggests that even outside of art moral value is already a kind of aesthetic value insofar as we make moral judgments we also make aesthetic judgments now an obvious difficulty with this argument as gore points out isn't talk of moral beauty and moral ugliness just metaphorical if I find a person's behavior morally bad I can say your behavior stinks but this doesn't mean that morally bad things literally smell bad I can say that somebody's attitude towards suffering is cold in the sense that they don't do Vince appropriate emotions it doesn't mean that their attitude literally has a low temperature humans naturally make association between different things we see similarities and use metaphors so just because we talk about things being morally beautiful or morally ugly it doesn't mean we're literally attributing aesthetic value to morality now I think the moral beauty argument is somewhat stronger than this criticism suggests I think there are good reasons to take talk of moral beauty and moral ugliness literally an important point that God notes is that generally we say that a word is used metaphorically when interpreting it literally would lead to absurdities your attitude is cold taken literally as obvious nonsense I mean it's a category error attitudes don't have temperatures or suppose that my friend is being dumped by his girlfriend he feels upset to cheer him up I say well there's plenty more fish in the sea that's true but totally irrelevant what does the amount of fish have to do with my friends predicament right well nothing like this seems to be the case to talk of moral beauty and moral ugliness it doesn't seem like there's any problem any kind of obvious absurdity and taking it literally the second note that there are many many kinds of beauty there's the beauty of physical appearance a sexy woman or striking mountain range but there are also more abstract kind of beauties scientists and mathematicians will often speak of the beauty of particular physical laws of beauty of mathematical theorems or particular numbers some people find number pi beautiful and either even some scientists who seem to take aesthetic considerations into their weighing of theories they may support the theory simply because they find it more elegant than the others whether that's an acceptable criterion of theory choices certainly opens a question but it shows that we can think of purely abstract things as being more or less beautiful so why shouldn't moral value be beautiful so I think we can defeat this first objection unfortunately there are a couple of other objections which are rather more damaging second the division between moral virtues and moral vices arguably does not match the division between the morally beautiful and morally ugly we often admire vices and find them compelling in various ways whereas moral virtues are often simply boring Susan wolf has an article called moral Saints which is well worth reading a moral saint is a person who has no vices whose every action is as morally good as it can be now Woolf asks would it be a good thing for a person to be morally perfect to be a moral Saint I mean is this it would be good morally of course but is this good as a kind of personal ideal would we want ourselves or our friends to be moral Saints when we start to think about what something involved in moral sainthood arguably no the moral Saint will spend all our time working for various charities you'll never insult people never be rude or sarcastic she had very few possessions of her own she'll never pursue any projects of her own because she spends all her time helping others the moral Saint could never become an exceptionally skilled guitarist for instance she could never have enough interest in philosophy to watch this video for instance you're not a moral saint if you're watching this video instead of working for charity so this is a person who would be dull boring she'd have no personality now consider the people you admire a lot of people of mine rock stars like Lenny David Bowie Mick Jagger rock stars are not moral Saints and very often their vices are what make them so appealing we all prefer people to have some vices so I'll give me then this the this idea that the moral virtues and moral vices divided neatly into the morally beautiful and morally ugly is very much open to question the third problem is similar to the second but I think perhaps more more damaging let's grant that moral virtues are always aesthetically beautiful and moral vices are always aesthetically ugly the problem now is that the division between the aesthetically good and aesthetically bad does not match the division between the aesthetically beautiful and aesthetically ugly ugliness is not necessarily an aesthetic defect in fact it can improve aesthetic value as a whole in the context of environmental aesthetics a famous example is hiking through an especially beautiful area and you come across the carcass of an elk filled with maggots this is really ugly it's repulsive you wouldn't want to take a photo of this and put the photo on the wall of your house to admire and yet we may feel that that these ugly parts of nature enrich the experience of the hike overall we might feel that our experience would have been lesser in some way if we'd only had the scenic and the beautiful parts now there are two ways really of putting this point first we can say the ugliness can become beautiful in the right context so when you consider the context of the ecosystem as a whole the cycles of life and death you can see that the rotting carcass has a beauty of its own death is an essential part of the ecosystem just as much as the beautiful clear rivers and the majestic redwood trees are now I find this approach implausible in its own right and in any case it doesn't really work as a response to the moral Beauty argument because God could could grant in fact he should grant that the morally bad can become morally good or at least be morally acceptable in the right context so a satire for instance will present a bad outlook in a critical context there's obviously nothing morally defective about that American Psycho for instance isn't morally defective because it presents a sort of materialistic attitude in a satirical context so if we take this approach I don't think this is this would really threaten courts argument because he could just say well as long as we put a morally bad attitudes in the right context then they're okay but now this is what is a canoe proach which is I think damaging to courts argument and this is the approach I find much more plausible is just to say that ascetic ugliness just in itself is not necessarily an aesthetic defect so we can grant that the rotting carcass is ugly and even if we know everything there is to know about biology and ecology we still find it ugly we can't help but be reposed by rotting carcasses so in no sense does it sort of become beautiful but this doesn't mean that rotting carcasses are aesthetically defective they may still help to enrich the the aesthetic experience I think this pretty seriously undermines the moral Beauty argument we can grant that the morally good is aesthetically beautiful and the morally bad is aesthetically ugly but it simply doesn't follow from this that the morally bad is an aesthetic defect because aesthetic ugliness is not necessarily an aesthetic defect so you just drive this point home here are a few paintings and drawings it seems to me that all of these images are aesthetically ugly in these cases it's not even that the context makes them less ugly because these are the whole artworks so you know what context are you putting them in that makes them less ugly these these are the complete things nevertheless they are still aesthetically brilliant so to sum up these two points the last two two points Gort wants to show that a moral virtue is an aesthetic virtue and a moral defect is an aesthetic defect but he assumes first of all that the morally virtuous and Maury bishops exactly tracks the morally beautiful and the morally ugly that is questionable and he assumes second that the mark that the beautiful the aesthetically beautiful in the aesthetically ugly exactly tracks the aesthetically good and the aesthetically bad both of these as oceans questionable in fact ii should definitely be rejected in my view as these sorts of images illustrate ugly things can be aesthetically brilliant this image is satin devouring a son by Goya I don't think there's anything beautiful about this I mean what what are we going to say maybe I don't know the depiction of the maybe there's some grace in how the body is depicted or something but even then I don't think it is if you look at that picture even kind of close-up even like the brushstrokes are really just thick and ugly it's not it's not a beautiful image so ultimately I think there is something plausible in the basic idea that moral value is already a kind of aesthetic value or we can say that a person's character is beautiful or ugly and I think this can be taken literally it seems a reasonable way of speaking but the stronger conclusion that moral virtues are always aesthetic virtues and moral defects are always aesthetic defects simply doesn't follow so that was a short introduction to moralism I hope it was helpful in the next video we'll look at variable ISM but that's all for now thanks for watching goodbye

Channel: Kane B

Views: 2,297

Rating: 4.8666668 out of 5

Keywords: philosophy, philosophy of art, ethics, aesthetics, moralism, autonomism, ethicism, moderate moralism, art, beauty, noel carroll, berys gaut, merited response argument, susan wolf

Id: Qjj3zTybU9k

Length: 38min 55sec (2335 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 11 2015