Is it ethical to watch House of Cards after the allegations against Kevin Spacey? Or to read Dostoevsky after reading his confession about raping a girl?
Thank you, Ajit Deshmukh, for an important question.
In an age of cancel culture, this question might seem to obviously bring a positive response. Of course, we shouldn’t teach/enjoy/celebrate the artistic work of people who engaged in various levels of morally despicable behavior! The problem is that when we start to go down the list of great artists, we find that valuable art is almost always made by pretty terrible people. Caravaggio was a murderer and a drunk, Gauguin gave children syphilis, Picasso was a raging misogynist, and pretty much everyone was an Anti-Semite. If we followed through with our moralistic purge, we would be left only with the finger-paintings of a particularly well-behaved kindergarten class. It seems impossible to separate good art from bad people. So how can these two notions coexist, and how are we to react to it?
In order to see how someone can be both a great artist and a terrible person, one needs to understand the difference between aesthetic and moral judgement. These judgements, though perhaps at times related, live in separate realms. In a basic sense, they have separate ends: aesthetic judgement takes beauty as its end, while moral judgement takes goodness. It seems obvious that we can recognize things as beautiful while also condemning them as lacking goodness and vice versa (recognizing Zac Efron as a hottie can coexist perfectly well with the judgement that he is a wanker, say). If we can judge beauty and goodness separately, it is also likely that one can be a talented judge of aesthetic beauty and be really terrible at judging the good or right thing to do. Through training and natural talent, one can become a keen decision-maker on all things beautiful, creating deeply powerful works of art, while having the moral decision-making skills of the Joker. Being a morally bad person does not make you a bad artist – the two are measured on different scales.
However, moral ideals do very often make their way into art. How are we to treat art infected with the ideals of a morally corrupt person. Well, it seems that one can be a good judge about what is morally good while being really bad at acting in a good way. That someone behaves in a certain way does not necessarily mean that their moral ideals are false. The great tragedy of life is that we can espouse all sorts of good and true ideals and then act in complete conflict with them. Yet, this does not rule out these ideals as unusable. If tomorrow we found out that MLK was a raging alcoholic who beat his wife, his ideals would be no less true.
Alas, artists sometimes adopt moral ideals that are wrong. In these cases, the artist’s repulsive behavior is in line with their principles, which are themselves repulsive. Here we must take it upon ourselves to find and expose the ways in which these corrupt ideals have influenced the art, so that we may be aware of the problematic assumptions that led the artist to make certain choices (the Oompa Lumpas in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, for instance). We filter the art through our own moral judgement in order to render inert the previously latent prejudice. In some works, the aesthetic and even the moral value will survive the filtering process; in other cases, there will be nothing of value left. In the end, while we cannot simply ignore the influence of morally corrupt artists on their art, it is still possible to enjoy the creations of bad people without endorsing their behavior or ideals.
What do you think? Should we enjoy good art by evil people? Let us know in the comments.
And, as always, if you have a question for the Armchair Philosophers, don’t hesitate to get in touch. You could send us a message or fill in this form.
Be sure to check out our podcast!
If you like what we do, you can support us by buying us a coffee!
Image: Chalk portrait of Caravaggio, by Ottavio Leoni (c1621)
I have a Masters degree in Philosophy from the University of South Carolina where I wrote a thesis on Immanuel Kant’s political philosophy under Konstantin Pollok. I am currently doing a PhD at the University of Groningen (the Netherlands) in the project “Universal Moral Laws” under Pauline Kleingeld. I am interested in Kant’s legal and political philosophy as well as contemporary jurisprudence and republicanism. Predictably, then, my favorite philosophical work is Kant’s Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals. This work contains, in my mind, some of most important ideas for the possibility of universal and objective moral laws.
It is also the case that the moral heft of an artist’s work can outweigh any sinful acts of sin he or she may have committed.
My concern still remains: how is it that a morally compromised mind can produce art which dazzles us? Surely it shouldn’t be possible for say, a heartless butcher to, immediately after inflicting untold suffering on others, sit down at the piano and play a piece so movingly as to make us cry? Something is wrong surely: are we being duped and have missed the tell-tale signs of his fakeness or is there really a core of goodness in the butcher? I can’t accept the duality you propose here ie that the same person can operate morally and artistically on two separate planes and can be both evil and artistically brilliant at the same time.
Even just from an evolutionary point of view, if we as a species were attracted by the deeds, creations and performance of morally-suspect individuals they would be more likely to gain prominence and propagate their sociopathic characteristics which would surely harm the species? Could there be a third possibility? That we are often duped by ‘brilliance’ (eg charisma in politicians for instance, thereby partly explaining the phenomenon of populism) at the expense of plain old understated honesty? In other words we subconsciously find the fakeness in the brilliance seductive and are therefore complicit in allowing it to continue concealing the evil within?