James Harold

I am grateful for Ted Nannicelli’s careful attention to my book. In his comment, Nannicelli makes two quite serious sets of objections to my views. The first set concerns my arguments against perspectivism, the view that the attitudes or perspectives manifested in artworks are morally evaluable. The second set concerns my arguments for meta-normative expressivism, the view that normative judgements are expressions of the attitudes of persons, not beliefs in mind-independent facts. In what follows, I offer responses to each of these sets of objections, which I hope will go some way towards answering them. If my responses fail to fully answer the objections, perhaps they can at least shed further light on the reasons behind our disagreements. For the most part, I stand behind what I wrote, but Nannicelli’s criticisms have helped me to see the ways in which I might have said more to support certain points and in which I might have been clearer. I hope this short response can make clear what I was trying to do in the book and why I was trying to do it.

If I had read Ted Nannicelli’s (2020) thoughtful and wide-ranging book before writing my own, I would not have written the same book that I did, and my book almost certainly would have been better for it. Ted Nannicelli’s 2020 book has many keen insights, and I learnt much from reading it.There is a great deal of overlap in our philosophical interests as well as in our views. Our books were written at the same time—at least, our writing times overlapped significantly—and by the time Nannicelli's was published, mine was already finalized, and it was too late for me to incorporate his insights into my own book. So I welcome the opportunity, however belated, to think carefully about Nannicelli’s ideas in conversation with my own.The first and most important thing to emphasize is my agreement with Nannicelli on many significant matters. Both Nannicelli and I are critical of the overwhelming focus in the ethical criticism of art on what Nannicelli calls ‘perspectivism’, the view that works of art should be judged morally on the basis of the perspective they take up (or attitude they prescribe, or similar). We are also both sceptical about the strength of the arguments concerning the moral-cognitive benefits of art. Both of us think that we need a more expansive toolkit for thinking about art and morality, including attention to the circumstances under which an artwork is produced. (The latter is something that I discuss only briefly, but Nannicelli is right that it is deserving of more careful attention.) Both of us are neutral about specific normative ethical theories. Nannicelli and I are both worried about the problem of relativism and how that affects how we think about moral judgements of artworks. And I think Nannicelli shares my scepticism about the search for easy answers to hard moral questions about the value of art.

Art has not always had the same salience in philosophical discussions of ethics that many other elements of our lives have. There are well-defined areas of "applied ethics" corresponding to nature, business, health care, war, punishment, animals, and more, but there is no recognized research program in "applied ethics of the arts" or "art ethics." Art often seems to belong to its own sphere of value, separate from morality. The first questions we ask about art are usually not about its moral rightness or virtue, but about its beauty or originality. However, it is impossible to do any serious thinking about the arts without engaging in ethical questions.

This volume is about how and whether art can be morally bad (or morally good). Politicians, media pundits, and others frequently complain that particular works of art are morally dangerous, or, sometimes, that particular works are morally edifying (the "great works" of literature, for example). But little attention is often given to the question of what makes art morally good in the first place. This comprehensive volume of forty-five new essays explores a wide variety of historical and theoretical perspectives, looking at different art forms and different problems. Each section of the volume samples a mix of topics that have been widely discussed alongside those that have been less noticed by philosophers. What emerges is a sense of the great variety of different problems and approaches as well as some recurring and overlapping themes. The essays in this volume put forth a deliberate effort to stretch beyond some of the debates and problems most familiar to Anglophone philosophers. Familiar topics and positions have been placed side by side in the volume with new and neglected ones, sometimes suggesting surprising connections and conflicts. The volume is divided into four sections: Historical Perspectives, Theoretical Approaches, Individual Arts, and Problems. Chapters in "Historical Perspectives" cover significant historical and cultural periods in which philosophical debates about ethics and art became salient, from ancient Greece and China to Japan, the Harlem Renaissance, and beyond. These chapters show the wide variety of different concrete practices that were associated with the idea of "art," as well as the great range of approaches to thinking about what constitutes an "ethical" concern. The section on "Theoretical Approaches" takes up questions about the relationship between moral and aesthetic evaluation, moral theories, and the familiar debate between "moralists," "autonomists," and others. The section on "Individual Arts" considers how moral questions arise in distinctive ways for different art forms, including traditional arts such as music, literature, and painting, and newer art forms such as video games. The final section, "Problems," takes up a variety of special ethical problems that arise in the arts, such as forgery, cultural appropriation, and moral learning.

Most value theories suppose that there are some values, such as autonomy or happiness, that one is always justified in valuing. These values are foundational, and all other values can be justified in terms of these foundations. For example, utilitarian theories suppose that happiness is intrinsically valuable and that art is valuable because experiencing art makes people happy. Foundational approaches sort all values into these two broad categories, intrinsic and extrinsic, and so, I argue, they overlook the interdependence of values on one another. In this dissertation I defend a coherence theory of value justification, according to which the reasons for valuing phenomena such as beauty, happiness, and autonomy are interdependent and mutually supporting. The coherence view suggests that we can understand the value of some object by asking whether and how valuing that object coheres with our other values, and especially with our core values. I go on to argue that this view offers some new and potentially rewarding ways of understanding some very difficult topics: e.g., the value of preserving wilderness, promoting art, and the value of human life without consciousness. In addition, I show that a coherence view can explain the relationships between aesthetic values and strictly moral values