Artistic Creation and Ethical Criticism

Abstract

Artistic Creation and Ethical Criticism advances a new, production-oriented approach to the ethical criticism of art. Its overarching arguments are these: (1) Judgments of an artwork’s ethical value are often made in terms of how it was created, and, furthermore, this is in part because some art forms more readily lend themselves to this form of ethical appraisal. (2) Among the ways in which art is ethically criticized, this production-oriented approach more often leads to practical consequences (censure, dismissal, prosecution, shifts in policy, legislation) because its claim to objectivity is less contested than that of other sorts of ethical criticism. (3) Together, (1) and (2) constitute an approach to the ethical criticism of art that is not only tacit in many art appreciative practices, but which is rationally warranted and defensible. In short, there are many cases in which one should ethically critique artworks in terms of how they are created because this approach encompasses cases that other approaches cannot and results in plausible judgments about the works’ ethical merits and flaws.