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Art and Ethics: Restarting and Advancing a Stalled Debate

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Art and Ethics (Art and Ethics: Restarting and Advancing a Stalled Debate)

Reporting period: 2017-10-01 to 2019-09-30

"This project was a work of philosophy investigating how artworks and other aesthetic objects and practices (henceforth ‘artworks’) acquire ethical properties and aesthetic properties, and how these two kinds of normative properties interact, if at all.

The project's main conclusions were the following: (1) that one way artworks can come to acquire ethical value is in virtue of prescribing appreciators to adopt pejorative attitudes towards oppressed groups merely in imagination, or (on the flip side) to embed such an prescription to imagine within an artistic context that unambiguously rejects those attitudes; (2) that a widely held principle, according to which artworks that prescribe unwarranted responses (e.g. laughter at something that isn't funny) are thereby aesthetically flawed, is false; (3) that in order to understand whether ethical properties can alter an artwork's aesthetic value in more than a trivial way, philosophers must first understand what kind of determining relationship they seek to establish between ethical and aesthetic value. For this, aestheticians and ethicists must turn to metaphysics.

These questions are important to society because the issue of the relevance of ethical to aesthetic properties in artworks is of perennial interest in the public sqaure, as evidenced by the mass interest in the #MeToo movement and the countless op-eds written about how the ethics of artists should bear on our appreciation of their work.

The project research comprises three objectives. Objective One (O1), the most concrete, is to propose new ways of theorizing how artworks acquire intrinsic ethical properties (henceforth just ‘ethical properties’). Roughly, these are ethical properties inhering in the artwork rather than in matters related to it externally, such as in consequences of appreciating a work. Objective Two (O2), the most abstract, is to offer a fundamental criticism of the entire literature which O1 addresses, and to articulate new ways of proceeding given this criticism. Objective Three (O3), the most positive, is to offer an account of ethico-aesthetic value interaction in light of the findings from O1 and O2."
As part of the project, two workshops - one in philosophy, one interdisciplinary - and a two-day conference were held at the University of Southampton. The latter was supported by two external grants besides the Marie Curie fellowship. There was also considerable outreach activity, most notably a public lecture at the 2018 Alrewas Arts Festival, the production of a short film that has been published on YouTube, and two articles written for the widely read Aesthetics for Birds blog. Outreach also included the hosting of a summer school on the Ethics of Cultural Appropriation at the University of Southampton.

In all, the project fellow conducted 16 academic talks, six in the UK and ten abroad (in Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, Poland, the US, Canada, Mexico, and Singapore).

The exploitation and dissemination of the project findings will be achieved through the publication of a book whose working title is 'Beyond Moralism: How Ethics Shapes Aesthetic Value in Art'. The book is under contract with Oxford University Press. It is anticipated that it will be published in 2022.
The project has advanced the state of the art in three respects. First, with respect to the preparation and likely imminent publication of 'Imagining in Oppressive Contexts'. This paper offers a wholly new way of thinking about how merely adopting certain putatively unethical attitudes in imagination can be unethical. Second, with respect to the publication and imminent publication of 'Meriting a Response' and 'Fatal Prescription', respectively. Both articles advance the litearture about the relevance of ethical to aesthetic values by throwing the central claim behind the dominant view (called 'moralism') into serious doubt. Third, with respect to the book the principal investigator Nils Stear is currently writing; the book builds on the work completed throughout this project to accomplish two significant things: it overturns the entire debate concerning the relevance of ethical to aesthetic value in art. Specifically, the book shows how the debate’s central question is ambiguous between an easy and a difficult reading and how large swathes of the literature unwittingly and needlessly address the easy reading. Second, the book defends a view called ‘immoralism’. This is, very roughly, the view that ethical merits and flaws can each worsen as well as improve artworks aesthetically. The book is under contract at OUP.

It is unclear what wider societal effects these findings will have, except to transform an academic literature and to considerably clarify what is at stake when academics and lay persons alike wonder (as they frequently do) whether an unethical artwork is thereby aesthetically worse. Dr. Stear, the project's investigator has also begun plans for a related project looking the relationship between oppressive forms of representation in film and systems of film classification that, if successful, will have significant policy implications for the motion picture industry.
Participants at the first Art & Ethics Workshop's meal.