Art and Moral Revolution

Traditionally, questions about the role of the arts in moral thought have focused on the arts’ role in the acquisition of new moral knowledge, the refinement of moral concepts, and the capacity to apply our moral view to particular situations. Here I suggest that there is an importantly different and largely overlooked role for the arts in moral thought: an ability to reconfigure the structure of our moral thought and effect what we might call a revolution in that framework. In this article I explain this distinction between two kinds of change in view, suggest the second type has not been addressed by the extant literature, provide examples of this role, and argue for its importance. Can the arts shape our moral outlook? Can novels and narratives, plays and poems, symphonies and sculpture color our ethical attitudes and help us think through moral problems? Might they even enlighten us about what is right, just, virtuous, and good? In recent years philosophers have framed these questions with an emphasis on one function of the arts in moral thought, sometimes to the neglect of others. The function that has received attention is the arts’ role in what I will call accretionary changes in moral thought: the acquisition of new moral knowledge, the refinement of moral concepts, and the capacity to apply our moral view to particular situations. A function that has received less attention is the arts’ potential to reconfigure the structure of our moral thought—their ability not only to offer new inputs to be schematized by an existing moral framework but to effect a revolution in that framework. This is the possibility I explore here. i. two kinds of cognitive change I trust that the distinction I am suggesting is familiar, even if in a rough form. We can change our view on a subject by acquiring a belief, revising a credence, or sharpening a concept, but we can also change our view in a more pervasive and fundamental way—by making a change in the background framework that conditions our thinking about that subject. This may include a change in our conceptual scheme, in the rules for making inferences about the subject matter, in the criteria we use for evaluating good and bad beliefs about that subject, in the contrast space we employ in articulating explanations, or in the kind of unity and coherence we seek in that view. Scientific revolutions are the archetype of the second kind of change. Most of the time scientists work with a fixed and largely unquestioned battery of methods, concepts, presumed connections between those concepts, experimental standards, and background assumptions. But sometimes, according to some historical accounts anyway, these things—the scientists’ paradigm or background framework—can also give way. This is a scientific revolution.1 Of course the distinction between these two kinds of change in the scientific case is difficult to draw with any real clarity or precision, and we should expect that difficulty to be a general feature of the distinction. It may be better to talk not about two kinds of changes in view but about a whole spectrum of more and less pervasive changes: from adding or subtracting a solitary belief to adding a new class of concepts The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73:3 Summer 2015 C © 2015 The American Society for Aesthetics 284 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism to reorganizing our conceptual scheme under an entirely new principle.2 Whatever we end up saying about this, it seems clear that the same distinction or gradient of distinctions is possible, at least in principle, for changes in our moral view. Simple examples are easy to find. We can decide that Pinocchio broke the rule never tell a lie, but we can also rethink how rigid the prohibition on lying ought to be. We can learn that Hester Prynne is a wanton, but we can also reconsider the appropriateness of the concept wanton. These are relatively mild forms of reconfiguration, limited as they are to a single rule or concept. But there are also more extreme examples that we might justly call moral revolutions in the same way we call Einstein’s a scientific revolution. One is the transition Nietzsche describes in the Genealogy of Morals. A moral slave revolt overthrew the traditional dichotomy of good and bad, which understood goodness as a kind of nobility. In its stead a different dichotomy was introduced—between good and evil, the latter side of which overlapped with the old notion of goodness. This was a reorganization of the hierarchy of moral concepts according to an entirely new scheme. The overall structure of conceptual space was rearranged, and as a result the way agents saw the moral world and came to moral conclusions was fundamentally transformed.3 The development of “modern moral philosophy” as described by G. E. M. Anscombe is a second example.4 According to Anscombe, this period saw a transition from a character-based ethics concerned with what sorts of habits of mind and dispositions best promote human flourishing to a law-based ethics that sees morality as constituted by sanctions that we are obligated to follow because they have some special authority. If she is right, then this transition is also an example of a moral revolution. For it involves not just a revision in the moral facts we accept or a small-bore conceptual change but a transformation in what we take the locus of moral evaluation to be, what sort of activity we identify as moral thought, and the regulative principles we aspire to as moral ideals. We can revisit the question of the precise borders of this distinction when we have examples in hand, but for now let us assume that there is an interesting, albeit imprecise distinction to be made between two kinds of change in moral outlook: one exemplified by our learning or unlearning moral propositions, better grasping the extension of the moral concepts we use, and getting the hang of applying our moral principles and another exemplified by systematic changes in the structure of moral thought and discourse, like Nietzsche’s moral slave revolt or the rise of modern moral philosophy. Just so we have names, let us call these change by accretion and change by reconfiguration. ii. art and cognitive change How do these changes come about? Are there any cognitive devices that might encourage or abet them? Call the view that works of art have some role to play in the development of our moral thought artistic cognitivism. There are good arguments for the species of artistic cognitivism concerning change by accretion. But the species of the view concerning the role of art in reconfiguring moral thought has, to my knowledge, been largely overlooked. This is reflected in prominent arguments for and against artistic cognitivism. Berys Gaut defends a version of artistic cognitivism by arguing that literature can play an important role in moral imagination. The imagination plays a crucial role in the process of bringing our moral judgments into reflective equilibrium, he says, because it can vividly present cases to us that must be captured by those judgments and may reveal latent tensions among them. The richness, depth, and psychological sophistication of the kind of imagination we have when engaging with literature makes it especially robust in this respect. Literary devices make these “imaginings more vivid, precise and powerful, and at the same time (not coincidentally) more cognitively instructive.”5 Thus, Gaut argues, “By deploying the full force of affective and experiential imagination, we can be made to feel the wrongness, rightness or sheer imponderability of certain moral choices, and so we can learn through imagination. And that is just what the epistemic claim of the cognitive argument maintains.”6 This argument and the examples Gaut offers along the way are concerned with the power of art to prompt accretionary changes in our moral view. Literature has the ability to provoke us into imagining cases that elicit novel considered judgments. These judgments must then be brought into reflective equilibrium with the rest of our moral outlook, and in doing this we may take on new Walden Art and Moral Revolution 285 moral beliefs, revise some old ones, and reject others. The learning that literature can further in this fashion consists in the addition and subtraction of items from our web of moral belief. Now Gaut does characterize his view more liberally than this, as concerning the power of art to further moral knowledge and understanding, but he does not suggest any means by which imagination might bring about more systemic changes—how it might, for example, reconfigure the methods by which we bring our beliefs into reflective equilibrium, what we are apt to keep or abandon in this pursuit, or the conception of equilibrium we are after. Indeed, it is prima facie difficult to see how imagination could do such a thing. Gaut’s attention therefore seems to be focused solely on the uses of art in accretionary changes in view. Another example comes from Noël Carroll. In an influential article he addresses three arguments against the possibility that the arts may have a function in moral education.7 The “banality argument” concedes that works of art may communicate truths about morals but suggests that these truths are by nature so banal that we cannot seriously call them educational. The “no evidence argument” maintains that while works of art may suggest moral hypotheses, they are not capable of providing evidence for them. The “no analysis argument” says that artworks lack the ability to provide a philosophically satisfactory analysis of an issue to render a judgment that we would be justified in believing. I am not concerned with these arguments themselves, but only in how they understand their target. They are arguments against the ability of an artwork to justify its audience in coming to believe particular moral propositions. As they have it, a certain kind of evidence or argument is required for this justification, and works of art are not capable of furnishing that justification. Their claim, then, is that art cannot aid in the accretion of moral knowledge. Carroll sets about rebutting these arguments, and in doing so he accepts much the same conception of artistic cognitivism. Like Gaut, Carroll’s statement of his thesis is not merely that art can help us accrete particular moral propositions. He endorses the more general thesis that artworks are useful for “stimulating ethical understanding.”8 Nonetheless if we look at his argument and the examples he uses to support it, I think it is clear that his conception falls on the accretionary side of the distinction. Carroll’s argument is that works of art are in certain respects like thought experiments, and they may perform a similar epistemic function. In particular, he points to thought experiments that help us better delineate the boundaries of our concepts. In the moral case, these thought experiments can “encourage conceptual discrimination of our virtue schemas through the imaginative deployment of structures of studied contrasts that function argumentatively.”9 This is something that works of art can do especially well. His primary example is E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End. By reading this novel, Carroll says, “we not only learn that, but also we become conscious of why we ought to withhold ascription [of certain virtues to certain people].”10 This is indeed a kind of moral understanding cultivated by engagement with a work of art, but notice what this understanding consists in. It involves learning propositions about borderline cases of concepts we already employ: “Helen is too imaginative because . . . whereas Margaret is not too imaginative because . . . ,” “Charles is too practical because . . . whereas Henry is not too practical because . . . .” This kind of change in view is clearly not a reconfiguration or structural transformation of our moral thinking but a fleshing out and refinement of that thinking: we are becoming better acquainted with the boundaries of the concepts we already employ. And for that reason, it is not an example of reconfiguration. It would be wrong to say that John Gibson believes that literature can help us accrete moral knowledge, since he thinks that what literature offers its readers is not so much knowledge but, borrowing a word from Stanley Cavell, acknowledgment. What literary narratives are able to do especially well is take the concepts we bring to our reading of a work and present them back to us as concrete forms of human engagement. When we read Othello, Notes from Underground or Bartleby the Scrivener, we see jealousy, suffering, and alienation presented not as mere ‘ideas’ but as very precisely shaped human situations. And this contextualization of these concepts, this act of presenting them to us in concrete form, is literature’s contribution