37

LITERATURE AND
MORALITY
A.W. Eaton

This chapter reviews the two primary ways in which moral issues pertaining to literature
are discussed in Anglophone philosophy of art. The first half of this essay looks at the
morally relevant influences that literature is thought to have on its audiences, while the
second half considers various positions on the question of whether a literary work's
moral character affects its artistic value. Since several extensive and incisive surveys of
this terrain are already available (Carroll 2000; Gaut 2009, chapter 7), this chapter
focuses on points of contention and subsequent developments.

Part One: Literature's Morally Relevant Influences

Moral judgment is a common feature of interpreting, appreciating, and evaluating
literary works. For example, we often attribute virtues or vices to characters and praise
or condemn their actions on explicitly moral grounds. Moral judgment is even written
into many of the concepts we use to understand literary works: just think, for instance,
of the very notion of villain.
A skeptic about the moral criticism of literature might point out that the moral
judgments just mentioned pertain to diegetic elements of literary works-that is, to things
within the world that a literary work describes-and that these judgments may diverge
starkly from moral judgments we might make about the work itself. While a literary work
might, for instance, tell the story of a mean and nasty person who deliberately hurts others,
this does not make the work itself mean and nasty; the moral valence of diegetic elements,
our skeptic is quick to point out, is conceptually distinct from the moral valence of the work
itself. Further, our skeptic persists, while it is not difficult to acknowledge the moral valence
of diegetic elements-after all, persons and their conduct are paradigmatic objects of moral
assessment-it is far from obvious how a literary work itself-which is inanimate--can be
the proper object of moral judgment.1 By what right, if any, do we make moral judgments
about literary works themselves?
Although few Anglophone philosophers of art directly attend to this question, the
tradition does implicitly offer a compelling answer: namely that a literary work's moral
valence lies in its influence on its audience. To be more specific, most philosophers working
in this tradition appear to implicitly hold that a literary work is mmally meritorious or mmally
flawed insofar as it has, or aims to have, a morally salutary or mmally deleterious influence,
 A.W. EATON

respectively, on its audience. It should be noted that this formulation raises the question of
whether this attribution of a moral valence to literary works rests on an empirical claim­
that literary works of type y do in fact have effects of type x on their target audience-or
an interpretive teleological claim-that literary works of type y aim to have, or have the
potential to yield, effects of type x on their target audience. Before we tum to this matter
at the end of this section, we must first get clear on the various construals of literature's
purported influence on its audiences. We shall focus on the following questions: What
kinds of morally relevant influences are literary works thought to have on their
audiences? How, exactly, are these influences achieved? What are the mechanisms of
literature's purported influence?
There are a few things to keep in mind as we explore the different views. First, we
should follow Shen-yi Liao in distinguishing between response-realistic and response­
unrealistic works (Liao 2013). A response-realistic work prescribes a certain kind of
imaginative response toward a particular sort of object and then cultivates, or aims to
cultivate, similar genuine responses toward real-world counterparts. Response­
unrealistic works, by contrast, prescribe a certain kind of imaginative response toward
a particular sort of object but then do not cultivate, or aim to cultivate, similar genuine
responses toward real-world counterparts. In some cases-e.g. satirical works-a
response-unrealistic work may cultivate the opposite kind of genuine response toward
real-world counterparts (Liao 2013). Second, while the philosophical literature tends
toward humanism-roughly, the conviction that literature (or, at least great literature)
ennobles, morally improves, and generally makes its audiences better human beings2-
I will bracket as much as possible the question of whether literature's effects are morally
remedial or morally deleterious in order to first clarify the various construals of the
basic structure and mechanism of literature's purported influence. Third, what I offer
below is a conceptual mapping of the terrain, rather than a list of actual philosophers'
views. Many, though not all, of the positions described below are compatible with one
another and plenty of philosophers' actual views are composites of several of those
described below. Finally and related, a one-size-fits-all model of literature's influence
on its audiences may be wrongheaded because it disregards significant and relevant
differences between genres, in particular the importantly distinct modes of influence
that different genres employ (James Harold 2007; Liao 1013). In the end we should
consider, then, whether some or all of these models might be genre-specific.

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1 Catharsis

This model, often attributed to Aristotle (especially to the Poetics), is traditionally

understood as morally salutary purgation.3 The basic idea is that when unhealthy emotions
are pent-up, this results in a pathological state that can have morally unsalutary
consequences for the subject. A vivid and compelling work of literature can bring relief
by arousing the unhealthy pent-up emotions in a safe context that brings no harm to
actual persons, thereby expelling these emotions and restoring both psychological
balance and moral order to the subject.
There are a couple of things to note about catharsis-as-purgation. First, it is response­
unrealistic: evoking a certain kind of imaginative response does not yield a tendency toward
similar genuine responses; rather, evoking a certain kind of response discharges the tendency
for similar genuine responses to real-world counterparts. Second, the model is used to
explain only moral improvement, via the expunging of morally unsalutary emotions; as far

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 LITERATURE AND MORALITY

as I know, the model is not used to explain how works might expunge morally salutary
emotions, although this is a conceptual possibility, at least in the absence of some broader
theory of human nature. Third, although the model no longer has much traction in
philosophical circles, it is still used in popular circles to justify what otherwise could seem
like morally very problematic literature such as rape fantasy fiction.

2 Imitation

This response-realistic model holds that a work leads, or aims to lead, an audience to
imitate, whether consciously or not, the actions, states, or features of a literary character.
Early versions of the imitation model are found in both Plato and Aristotle. For all
their significant differences, both Plato and Aristotle held that the audience's reactions­
emotional and otherwise-to things represented in a work are echoed in the audience
reactions to those very same kinds of thing in real life. Much of Republic X, for instance,
is devoted to developing Plato's worry that when the audience responds with sympathy
to the expression of emotions by literary characters, this strengthens the audience's
tendency to feel these same emotions in real life. Aristotle expresses much the same
worry when he says: "The habit of feeling pleasure or pain at mere representations is not
far removed from the same feelings about realities" (PoUtics 1340a 11-25). The notable
difference between the two is more a matter of focus than a principled disagreement
(Nehamas 1988, 218): whereas Plato, at least on the one hand, worried that literature's
power to inspire imitation would morally corrupt its audience, Aristotle focused on lit­
erature.'s potential to morally improve its audiences. And it is worth noting that Aristotle
also acknowledged literature's capacity to corrupt, and strong arguments have been made
that the fact that Plato's RepubUc itself employs a literary form demonstrates Plato's
conviction that literature has the capacity to morally improve (Meinwald 2011).
Despite these venerable roots, nowadays the imitation model is typically dismissed by
Anglophone philosophers of art as crude and overly simplistic; it is often thought to be
a kind of"monkey-see-monkey-do" model that grossly underestimates the psychological
complexity and sophistication both of audiences and of the interpretive process.
Ultimately, however, the question of whether a work tends to lead its audience to
imitate the conduct or traits of a character is an empirical one.4 What evidence is there
to support or disconfirm the imitation model?
In an important essay from 2004, Susan Hurley offers a comprehensive overview of
cognitive science and neuroscience showing that rather than being a slavish form of
monkey-see-monkey-do, imitative learning is an important part of distinctively human
social learning (Hurley 2004 ). Hurley brings this to bear on scientific research regarding
violent media, showing that the strong and growing consensus among various kinds of
researchers overwhelmingly supports the following two theses:

First, exposure to media violence causes an increase in violent behavior of significant

effect and size across the populations of viewers, in both the short and the long
terms. Secondly, that it often does so"directly" in ways that are unrecognised and
bypass the individual viewers autonomous deliberative processes.
(Hurley 2004, 186)

Since Hurley's study focuses exclusively on"media"-i.e. movies, television, music, video
games, and the internet-! do not mean to offer it as direct evidence for the imitation

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thesis with respect to literature. My point, rather, is that the fact that the imitation model
strikes some as "crude" does not mean that it is false; indeed, it may be right and may be
an important part of a broader picture of literature's morally relevant influences on
audiences. On this much more empirical work needs to be done, a point to which we
return at the end of this chapter.

3 Conditioning

Conditioning occurs when a given response-whether behavioral or psychological

(where the latter includes affective responses that do not leaf out into action)­
becomes more likely or less likely as a result of reinforcement. Whereas catharsis and
imitation models do not, strictly speaking, require that the audience repeatedly engage
with a particular literary work or type of work in order for the effect in question to
obtain, conditioning models depend on the audience's repeated engagement with a work
or type of work in order for the effect in question to obtain or to be maintained. Literature
and other arts, some hold, can provide such reinforcement in ways that are morally
relevant. For example:

• Sensitization is response realistic: where repeated stimulation of an imaginative

response by a literary text can progressively amplify the subject's tendency toward
a genuine response of the same type. For instance, some think that by soliciting
empathy for characters, repeated engagement with literature as prescribed-that
is, responding as the work prompts-can make its audience more empathetic
(James Harold 2003).
• Desensitization is response unrealistic: repeated stimulation of an affective response by
a literary work diminishes or otherwise dulls the audience's responsiveness to that kind
of stimulus in the real world. For instance, some worry that repeated exposure to liter­
ary scenes of graphic violence can reduce the audience's responsiveness not just to
scenes of graphic violence in literature, but also to actual violence in the world. But
it should be noted that desensitization can, according to some, occur for other kinds
of affective response; for instance, some argue that violent pornography's stimulation
of erotic responses desensitizes the audience to that stimulus, thereby encouraging the
audience to pursue ever more violent pornography in order to have an erotic response.
• Mere exposure-effects, w,ere repeated exposure to literary representations of a thing
leads the audience to develop a genuine preference for real-world counterparts.
However, there has been little research on preferences developed as a result of
repeated exposure to representations of a thing, so more empirical work needs to be
done in this area before we can pronounce on literature's capacities in this regard.

4 Literary Moral Cognitivism

A broad family of views holds that literature can be a source of moral knowledge or,
though seldom discussed, moral ignorance. Moral knowledge is here typically divided
into propositional and non-propositional varieties. Most literary moral cognitivists
emphasize literature's contribution to non-propositional moral knowledge, though a
few hold that in addition literature can also convey propositional moral knowledge
(Gaut 2009, section 7.2). I discuss each sort in tum.

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 LITERAlURE AND MORALITY

4.1 Propositional Moral Knowledge

There is considerable skepticism about literature's capacity to provide propositional

knowledge (Stolnitz 1992; Lamarque and Olsen 1997; Carroll 2000, 353 ff.; Gibson 2008,
section III). [Here I would also refer readers to the Harold essay in this volume.] Not only
are literary works often ambiguous or contradictory and posit impossibilities, but there
are other more specific problems that would seem to make literature a poor candidate for
moral knowledge. First, literature cannot meet the confirmation condition: that is,
literature cannot confirm the truth of the "facts" it offers, leaving us to rely on other
works which then become the true source of whatever knowledge is gained. Second, the
propositional moral truths literature offers are usually trivial. Third, literature's moral
insights are most always presupposed by the work in question. Fourth, literature's moral
truths (when construed propositionally) are better-i.e. more economically and precisely­
presented by non-literary works such as philosophical treatises. In full recognition of
these problems, some nevertheless think that literature can provide certain kinds of
morally relevant propositional knowledge such as morally relevant facts about human
psychology, new moral concepts, or morally relevant testimony (Gaut 2009, 143- 147).

• Thought Experiments: Some argue that critics of the propositional-knowledge model

grossly oversimplify and fail to capture the complex contributions to the audience's
propositional moral knowledge that literature can make. Critics assume, so this line
of argument goes, that literary works are purported to merely provide moral
concepts or precepts for the audience to reject or accept. This leads to the various
criticisms mentioned above. However, E.M. Dadlez and Eileen John argue that
there is another route to propositional moral knowledge, namely the thought-exper­
iment. On this model, literary works present readers with vivid imaginary scenarios
that present conceptual challenges and prompt reasoning about specific problems
in ways that lead, or aim to lead, the audience to revise or refine their moral con­
cepts and precepts (John 1998; Dadlez 2005; Dadlez 2009).5

4.2 Non-Propositional Moral Knowledge

Most Anglo-American philosophers of art, however, conceive of literature's potential to

morally instruct not as passing along new information or concepts or precepts but, rather,
as teaching non-propositional knowledge. This has been understood in a variety of ways
(many of which are compatible with one another):

• Aristotelian habituation: Like conditioning models (discussed above), Aristotelian

habituation is literature's reinforcement of certain traits in a way that requires
extended engagement on the part of the audience. The Aristotelian models differ
from mere conditioning in that it is not mere unthinking responses that are
purportedly reinforced but, rather, capacities, skills, dispositions, and sensitivities
that amount to what many call knowledge-how. Some draw an analogy between
engaging with literature and physical exercise: like physical activity, regular and
proper engagement with literature exercises, strengthens, and cultivates our moral
powers (Carroll 2000, 366 ff.; Carroll 1996, 140 ff.; James Harold 2003). Following
Aristotle, Martha Nussbaum focuses on the way that literature confronts us with
the richness and mystery of human moral life, thereby exercising and refining our

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moral imaginative, emotional and perceptive capacities to do things like be

attuned to morally relevant particulars (Nussbaum 1992, chapters 4 and 5). Along
similar lines, Jenefer Robinson argues that literature evokes emotional experience
and encourages readers to reflect on this experience in ways that focus our atten­
tion and increase our moral sensitivity (Robinson 1995; Robinson 2007, part 2).
Noel Carroll's clarificiationism holds that literary works increase moral know how
by exercising and thereby honing, expanding, or otherwise developing morally
relevant capacities and skills that the audience already possesses to some degree
(Carroll 1998a; Carroll 2000, 366-369).
• Phenomenological Knowledge: A literary work that portrays a character or situation
with vivid and perspicuous first-person details provides a rich and compelling sense
of what it is Uke to be another (Mathew Kieran 1996; Currie 1995).6 Insofar as this is
thought to provide a sense of what it's like to be a person who actually exists or
existed somewhere in the world, it falls prey to the so-called confirmation-condition­
objection (discussed above): literature itself cannot tell us whether this sense is
accurate or inaccurate, and so we must appeal to some other source for verification,
which makes the outside source, and not the literary work, the true source of said
knowledge. However, some have responded that the phenomenological knowledge
conveyed by literary works may be morally beneficial in ways that do not depend on
the accuracy of the imagined experience. Daniel Jacobson, for instance, argues that by
rendering valuable (attractive, appealing, etc. ) something that we would not normally
consider to be valuable, a literary work sheds light on heretofore unacknowledged
values and gives us a sense of what it's like to hold a perspective different from our own,
thereby making the audience more empathetic and open-minded (Jacobson 1996).
Along these lines, Jacobson argues that the perspectives with which literature acquaints
us need not be morally laudable; by providing the audience with knowledge of what it's
like to be immoral (from the audience's perspective), artworks challenge the audience
to critically examine their own most deeply held moral convictions and thereby help
the audience to become less dogmatic {Jacobson 1996; Jacobson 1997). Matthew
Kieran makes the stronger claim that a complete understanding and appreciation of
moral goodness requires first-hand experience of moral badness, which is precisely
the kind of phenomenological knowledge with which literature can provide the
audience (Matthew Kieran 2003, sec. Ill; Matthew Kieran 2005, 191-192).7

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5 Problems for Further Research

This section began with the question of what makes a literary work the proper object of
moral judgment. I noted a tendency in Anglophone philosophy of art to locate a work's
moral valence in its influence on its audiences: more specifically, a Uterary work is morally
meritorious or morally flawed insofar as it has, or aims to have, a morally salutary or morally
deleterious influence, respectively, on its audience. It is now time to confront an equivocation,
namely whether the claim is (1) an empirical-causal one about the effects that literary
works actually have on audiences, or (2) an interpretive-teleological claim about the
effects that works aim to have on their audiences.
We should first note that, at least initially, most all Anglophone philosophers discuss­
ing this issue are concerned only with the audience as normatively specif�ed. The question
is not how literary works influence or aim to influence any audience whatsoever but,
rather, how they influence, or aim to influence, their target audience; that is, the audience

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that the work addresses (Eaton 2012, 282). (I say "at least initially" because, as we shall
see, some determinations of immorality are made because the current actual audience will
not, on moral grounds, adopt the perspective of the target audience. More on this below.)
Which position Anglophone philosophers adopt-the empirical-casual or the inter­
pretive-teleological-tends to vary according to the broader discussion in which the
views are embedded. In the context of literary moral cognitivism, which focuses almost
exclusively on literature's capacity to morally improve its audiences and gives hardly any
attention to literature's capacity to morally degrade, philosophers tend to (implicitly}
embrace a hedged version of the empirical-casual thesis: they say that literature "may
lead to knowledge" or "can assist moral change."8 But where the immorality of a work is
the focus, as it tends to be in discussions about the relationship between a work's
moral value and its aesthetic value (to be discussed in the next section), Anglophone
philosophers explicitly deny that a work's moral value has anything to do with its effects
in the world (Gaut 1998, 184; Carroll 2000, 356). Sometimes these are the very same
philosophers who, in the context of moral cognitivism, embrace the idea that literature can
and does influence its audience (e.g. Carroll). The reason for this eschewal of the
empirical-causal issues in one context but, often, not in the other is that, as Berys Gaut
notes, talk about morally harmful effects of works is often quickly followed by calls for
government regulation and censorship (Gaut 2009, 7), and I know of no philosophers
who want to be seen as in any way endorsing censorship.
While the desire to dissociate oneself from censorship is understandable, we ought
not give in to the misguided assumption that attributing morally harmful effects to a
work automatically means endorsing censorship or other government regulation. As I
have argued elsewhere, plenty of things are morally harmful yet do not license state
intervention (Eaton 2007). And there are, I think, good reasons to take the empirical­
casual issue seriously, especially since the interpretive-teleological position cannot be
kept utterly distinct from empirical-causal matters. Here is what I mean.
In an attempt to sidestep the empirical-causal issue altogether, some, like Noel Carroll
and Berys Gaut, explicitly construe a work's moral valence in terms of the work's attitude,
where this is a matter of the responses that a work prescribes.9"Prescription" is a norma­
tive notion that does not rest on empirical claims about how audiences do in fact respond
to works; rather, "prescription" is a matter of a work's aims, of stipulating how one ought
to respond to the work. The idea here is that a work is immoral just in case it prescribes
a response that the audience finds unacceptable on moral grounds, whereas a work is
morally good just in case it prescribes a response that the audience ought to accept on
moral grounds. This construal of a literary work's moral valence offers a compelling way
of distinguishing between the moral valence of diegetic elements and that of the work
itself. While a work might represent a morally heinous crime, the work itself might be
morally laudable precisely because of its attitude of condemnation toward the crime.
But the Carroll/Gaut formulation of a work's moral stance does not altogether avoid
empirical-causal questions. Consider again their view: A work is morally flawed insofar
as it has a morally flawed attitude, where "morally flawed attitude" is cashed out as the
prescription of a response that it would be morally wrong for the audience to have. Let
us take an example: a so-called "bodice-ripper" novel that prescribes an erotic response
toward the rape of its heroine. This seems prima facie an obvious candidate for a flawed
moral response, but let us ask what makes it so. If a response is utterly causally discon­
nected from all aspects of a reader's life-that is, if the response remains directed solely
at the fictional situation represented by the work and in no way influences the way the

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reader thinks, feels, or acts-is said response nevertheless morally flawed? Or, imagine
that the prescribed response does affect the reader's genuine attitudes toward rape, but
that it does so in the morally salutary manner proposed by catharsis theorists. My hunch
is that in either case, Carroll, Gaut, and others would not consider the prescribed imag­
inative response to be morally flawed. The reason, I suggest, that theorists consider a
given prescribed response to be immoral is unacknowledged concern about the morally
negative lasting effects that said response will have on the subject. I do not mean to
suggest that the interpretive-teleological question about prescribed responses amounts
to nothing more than an empirical question; rather, I mean simply to insist that empir­
ical questions cannot be eliminated from the discussion of a work's moral valence, even
when the focus is a work's aims.
This returns us, then, to empirical questions: Do literary works have morally relevant
effects on readers? Or, to be more precise, under normal conditions, do literary works of
a certain type (here we might include considerations of genre, as Liao urges) have par­
ticular kinds of effect on their target audience, where these effects are morally relevant
in the sense that they (1) have a lasting effect on the audience's character or (2) prompt
the audience to act in a way that is morally assessable. And if so, what forms might this
take and what are the mechanisms of influence?
Unlike most literary moral cognitivists, Gregory Currie has always insisted that these
are empirical questions that must be tested. While he was once optimistic about litera­
ture's potential to morally improve its audience (Currie 1995; Currie 1998), Currie has
become quite skeptical of the idea that we learn anything, moral or otherwise, from
literary works, at least in the ways that literary moral cognitivists describe (Currie 2011;
Currie 2013). Currie's recent doubts take the following form. The question of whether
literature morally improves its audiences is ultimately an empirical one. Nussbaum and
other literary moral cognitivists provide no evidence that literature has such positive
effects, 10 and Currie doubts that any such evidence is forthcoming-and not merely
because it would be extremely difficult to track and measure the effects of a person's
engagement with a given work or with multiple works. The real problem, Currie thinks,
is that recent work in personality and social psychology paints a picture of human moti­
vation and action that undermines literary moral cognitivism. In a nutshell, literary
moral cognitivism would seem to depend on the idea that motivation and conduct are
governed by robust character traits, where the latter are what literature purportedly
develops and trains. But a lar�e and growing body of work from personality and social
psychology supports the idea tnat it is a person's situation, rather than robust features of
her character, that makes the difference between her choosing or acting well and her
choosing or acting badly (Doris and Stich 2014, section 4). Further, these situational
features that can make such a moral difference are often morally trivial or irrelevant:
Consider, for instance, an oft-cited study that showed that subjects who had just found
a dime were 22 times more likely to perform a simple and non-strenuous act of helpful­
ness than subjects who had not found a dime (lsen and Levin 1972). To make matters
worse, Currie notes, we are typically oblivious to the strong influence of the vicissitudes
of our situation on our behavior.11 This means that while a person may attribute an act
of generosity to her having read Dickens, she is likely completely wrong about the moti­
vations for her actions (Currie 2013).
While Currie gives us good reasons to be dubious of literary moral cognitivism, they
do not cut against aU models of literary influence. The catharsis, imitation, and condi­
tioning models are must less rationalistic in the ways they conceive of literature's

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potential influence on readers. Indeed, on the situationalist picture that Currie embraces,
exposure to literature could be that feature of a person's situation that gets them to act
well rather than badly. However, whether literature would be a more potent and lasting
element of a person's situation than, say, finding two dimes, remains to be demonstrated.

Part Two: Relationship Between Moral and Aesthetic Value

What is the relationship between a literary work's moral value and its aesthetic value?
This question is conceptually distinct from our first set of questions about whether
literary works can have a moral value at all and if so, in virtue of what. One could
embrace any of the above views about literature's capacity to morally improve or
deteriorate without thinking that this redounds to a work's aesthetic credit or discredit.
And while it is conceptually possible to affirm that a work's moral value in some way
affects its aesthetic value yet deny that literature has moral effects on, or has a capac­
ity or aim to morally influence, its audience, such a view would have to locate the
moral valence of a work elsewhere and, as discussed above, other promising candidates
are missing.
Here are the various ways of conceiving of the relationship between a literary work's
moral value and its aesthetic value.

1 Moralism

A family of views, which we might call moralism, holds that moral features of artworks
can be aesthetically relevant. The strongest version of this view, which Noel Carroll calls
radkal moralism, holds that the moral value of a work always determines its aesthetic value
(Carrolll996). Variants of this view might affirm the determinative strength without the
temporal modal-i.e. moral value determines aesthetic value only in certain cases--or
affirm the temporal modal without the determinative strength-i.e. in all cases, the
moral value of a work influences, but does not determine, its aesthetic value.
Proponents of any version of radical moralism are exceedingly rare in the contempo­
rary Analytic tradition. Instead, most philosophers who are not autonomists argue for a
more moderate form of moralism, namely that moral flaws in artworks can diminish their
aesthetic value whereas moral virtues can enhance them aesthetically. Within this family
there are two arguments for the position-ethicism and moderate moralism-and there is
some debate about how, if at all, to distinguish between them.12

2 Ethicism

Berys Gaut argues for a variety of moralism that he calls ethicism (Gaut 1998). While
Gaut later gives three arguments for ethicism (Gaut 2009), the most influential argu­
ment is what he calls the merited response argument, which goes like this: Representational
artworks often prescribe responses to the things they depict. Failure to engender a pre­
scribed response is one kind of aesthetic defect; for instance, the thriller that fails to
provoke a sudden and sharp feeling of excitement fails to this extent and on its own
terms. Some artworks are morally flawed in the sense that they prescribe responses that
we have good moral reason to reject; consider, for instance, one of the many works that
prescribe homophobic disgust at its gay characters.13 Such a work is also aesthetically
flawed, according to this argument, in that it gives us good reason not to respond in a

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way required for its own aesthetic success. This is, as previously noted, one kind of
aesthetic defect, namely the failure to warrant a response that the work in question aims
to provoke. It is important to note that ethicism does not hold that all moral defects
yield aesthetic flaws; rather, it is only this particular sort of moral flaw-prescribing a
morally problematic response-that is an aesthetic flaw.
The strongest criticism of this argument-and, insofar as it is similar, of Carroll's
argument (see below)-has not been sufficiently appreciated.14 It comes from Daniel
Jacobson (Jacobson 1997), who convincingly shows that ethicism conflates two impor­
tantly distinct ways in which an emotional response to an object-in this case a work
of art--can be warranted (or unwarranted) (D'Arms and Jacobson 2000). (1) A response
can be warranted in the sense that it fits its object; that is, when the object possesses the
evaluative features that the response correctly tracks. (2) In a distinct sense, a response
to an object may be warranted in that having the response would be right for reasons
that have nothing to do with whether the object possesses features picked out by that
response: e.g, for prudential or moral reasons. In such instances, the sense in which a
response is warranted and so appropriate (or unwarranted and so inappropriate) is logi­
cally distinct from epistemic concerns about whether the work possesses the features
that the response picks out. It can be true both (I) that I have a reason (prudential or
moral) to not be amused by a play and (2) that the play possess features correctly tracked
by the response of amusement. Conflating these two kinds of reason, as moralists do,
falls prey to what Jacobson and Justin D'Arms call the moralistic fallacy: a faulty inference
from the claim that it is morally wrong to have a given emotional response toward some
object, that the response does not fit that object (D'Arms and Jacobson 2000). Without
this inference, the merited response argument appears to collapse.
Gaut could respond that his argument does not rest simply on this inference. Rather,
the idea is that only when the prescription of a particular response plays an aesthetically
significant role in a work, then the work's overall aesthetic success requires that this
response obtain. If the response does not obtain, and this failure is due to some intrinsic feature
of the work, 15 then the work is in this respect and to this extent aesthetically impoverished.
However, this response does not circumvent Jacobson's objection, as I demonstrate
(Eaton 2012, 286). The fact that a work contains an intrinsic obstacle to a particular
emotional response says nothing about whether the response would be fitting; rather, the
case shows simply that something impedes the response, not that the work lacks features
worthy of that response. The stipulation that the obstacle be a structural feature of the
work itself does not help, for even an o�stacle that is built-in to the work can be irrel­
evant to the response's fittingness; for instance, a moral flaw might impede access to a
work's aesthetically praiseworthy features, but the praiseworthy features would still be
there to be appreciated by anyone who was willing and able to look past the moral
blemishes. All that the merited response argument shows, Jacobson concludes, is that a
work's aesthetically praiseworthy features can be rendered inaccessible by its moral flaws;16
it does not show that a work's moral flaws yield or amount to aesthetic blemishes.17

3 Moderate Moralism

Despite apparent similarities, Carroll insists that his moderate moralism is importantly
different from Gaut's ethicism. The difference, Carroll claims, is that whereas Gaut's
ethicism relies on the merited response argument, moderate moralism relies on what
Carroll calls the uptake argument (Carroll 2013a, 375 n. 1; Carroll 2000, 377-379). Like

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the merited response argument, the uptake argument (1 ) is concerned with the
emotional responses that a work prescribes toward the things it represents and
(2) focuses on the kind of failure that results from the failure to engender these responses.
Carroll writes, "Securing audience uptake to the responses a work prescribes is a leading
feature of any artwork's agenda. Failing to secure uptake, then, is an aesthetic defect in
an artwork" (Carroll 2000, 277). But although there is a slight shift in language-from
"meriting responses" to "securing uptake"-the two positions might appear to be essen­
tially the same. If anything, Gaut's view would appear to have an advantage because of
its normative dimension. That is, whereas failure to "merit a response" must be attrib­
uted to the work in question, failure to "secure uptake" could be attributed to
circumstances of or flaws in the audience; e.g. a comic novel fails to "secure uptake"
because its actual audience is depressed or not the target audience.
However, as Carroll elaborates on his view, it becomes clear that the "uptake argu­
ment" concerns not the empirical question of whether works actually do in fact secure
uptake but, rather, normative issue regarding the moral warranting conditions for some
emotional responses. Carroll writes:

Many (most?) artworks prescribe emotional responses. Some of these emotional

responses contain, among other warranting conditions, moral considerations
(in the way that anger requires the perception of injustice); and some of these
emotional responses are moral through and through (for example, a feeling of
social indignation).
(Carroll 2000, 377)

This is an important passage because it contains a compelling response to Jacobson's

objection. For Carroll, a prescribed emotional response is unwarranted not in Gaut's
sense that it would be the morally wrong response to have but, rather, because the
object toward which the response is directed lacks features that are criterial for the
response, where these criteria happen to be moral; or, to put the point in Jacobson's
terminology, a prescribed response ought not obtain because it fails to fit its object in the
sense that the object does not meet the moral warranting criteria for the prescribed
response. Carroll concludes:

An artwork that fails to secure emotional uptake is aesthetically defective on

its own terms. Moreover, an artwork may fail to secure the emotional responses
it mandates because its portrayal of certain characters or situations fails to fit
the moral warranting criteria appropriate to the mandated emotion. And one
way it can fail to do this is by being immoral.
(Carroll 2000, 377)

Carroll's argument hinges on there being cases where the moral qualities of an object
bear on an emotion's fittedness to that object. Jacobson, along with Justin D'Arms,
acknowledges that some emotions have what they call an "emotional shape"; that is, the
emotion's presentation of its object involves moral concepts. They note that:

guilt and anger have been called "moral emotions" precisely because they pres­
ent their objects in light of such moral concepts as desert, fault, and
responsibility. Hence, moral features of a situation can properly be invoked to

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 A.W. EATON

contest the fittingness of guilt and anger as responses to it, and in some cases
they suffice to show that the emotion fails to fit.
(D'Arms and Jacobson 2000, 87)

One thing that the moderate moralist needs to answer, then, is that there are other
emotions that have a partially or wholly moral shape (that is, where moral consider­
ations partially or wholly determine whether the emotion fits its object). In particular,
are there emotions of the sort prescribed by artworks-and in this case, by literary works
in particular-that have a partially or wholly moral shape? I argue that three emotions
that literary (and other) works frequently prescribe toward characters have a partially
moral shape; namely, sympathy, affection, and admiration (Eaton 2012). The basic idea
here is that being morally good is one of the traits that render a character worthy of being
liked, admired, or found sympathetic, while being morally flawed renders a character
unworthy of these emotions. It follows, on Carroll's view, that a work that prescribes,
say, admiration for a morally flawed character may be aesthetically flawed in the sense
that the work prescribes a response that it does not itself merit - where this formulation
skirts Jacobson's objection. I say "may be aesthetically flawed" because these emotions
have only a partially moral shape and so are not necessarily unwarranted when their
object is morally flawed, a point to which we return when we discuss immoralism below.
In conclusion, this discussion has brought to light several similarities and differences
between ethicism and moderate moralism. They argue for the same general conclusion,
namely that in certain cases a moral defect in an artwork can be an aesthetic defect. And
both are concerned with a particular kind of aesthetic defect; namely, the failure to war­
rant a prescribed emotional response. But, I suggest, they construe warrant differently:
whereas Gaut is concerned with the moral appropriateness of responding as prescribed,
Carroll is concerned only with those responses that have what D'Arms and Jacobson call
a (partially or entirely) moral shape. Although more work needs to be done on the ques­
tion of which emotions are peculiarly moral emotions in this sense, it is clear that the
upshot is that moderate moralism is more limited in scope than ethicism. (This may be
what Carroll means when he says that his view is"weaker" than Gaut's (Carroll 2000, 374),
a point that Gaut rejects (Gaut 2009, 50). It also means that while ethicism opposes
the idea that a moral flaw could ever be an aesthetic merit, moderate moralism is at least
in principle open to the notion (Gaut 2009, 50-51); indeed, Carroll himself acknowl­
edges this as a conceptual possibility (Carroll 2000, 379 ff.). At the end of the next
section we explore what this compl\tibility between moderate moralism and immoralism
might look like, and consider whether this should be seen as a flaw or merit of the view.

4 Immoralism

A family of views that have come to fall under the heading "immoralism" argue that
moral flaws in works can be or can yield aesthetic merits. Since the arguments for and
conclusions of each differ, it will be worth it to go through them.

4.1 Kieran's Cognitive lmmoralism

In something of an about-face from his earlier moral cognitivist stance (Kieran 1996),
Matthew Kieran has recently developed a view that he calls Cognitive Immoralism (hereafter CI):

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 LITERATURE AND MORALITY

the thesis that when an artwork's moral value is aesthetically relevant, moral flaws enhance
the work's aesthetic value (Matthew Kieran 2003; Matthew Kieran 2005, chapter 4;
Matthew Kieran 2006). Although some proponents of Moralism have criticized Cl, they
have missed what I take to be the view's fundamental weakness (J. Harold 2008; Stecker
2008). I shall briefly explain CI and reveal the nature of what I take to be its core defect. 18
Kieran's argument begins from the view that he and others call "aesthetic cognitivism,"
the idea that insofar as a work increases our knowledge in appropriate ways, it is aesthetically
good. Kieran then argues that soliciting immoral responses can make a positive contribution
to the audience's understanding in several ways. First, by providing first-hand acquaintance
with perspectives that are morally inimical to the audience's, immoral artworks challenge
the audience to examine our own most deeply held beliefs and thereby help us to become
more open-minded.19 Second, Kieran argues, a complete understanding and appreciation of
moral goodness requires first-hand experience of moral badness, and it is precisely the latter
that immoral works offer (Matthew Kieran 2003, section III; Matthew Kieran 2005, 191-192).
So although it may seem that a novel like The 120 Days of Sodom threatens to pervert our
morally relevant sentiments by encouraging us to condone and take pleasure in the abuse
and degradation of various characters, according to Kieran such works in fact enlarge our
perceptual and emotional capacities and in this way offer substantial cognitive gains. This
increase in our understanding is, per aesthetic cognitivism, an aesthetic merit.
Kieran makes a convincing case that immoral art has the potential to enlarge its
audience's understanding. However, as an account of immoral art's aesthetic value, CI
is unsatisfactory for two reasons.
First, CI captures too much. Given a sufficiently sophisticated, self-aware, and virtuous
audience in the right circumstances, any immoral work has the potential to serve as an
occasion for the kind of learning Kieran so ably describes. Second, CI disarms immoral
art by emptying it of the very thing that makes it so disturbing and threatening, namely
its immorality. On CI's account, the apparent menace of immoral works is but a mere
provisional appearance since they ultimately improve their audiences morally. It is moral
knowledge that Kieran thinks immoral art offers: entering into the sentiments of immoral
works is a primary way to liberate us from our dogmatic slumber and to achieve a full
understanding and appreciation of the good. Although, according to Cl, immoral art's
methods are oblique-it arrives at its moral lessons by first drawing the audience into an
immoral perspective-its effects coincide with those of moral art: to make us more open­
minded and tolerant, to refine our capacities to distinguish the good from the bad, and
to instill a proper understanding and appreciation of the human condition. 20

4.2 Eaton's Robust Immoralism

As mentioned above, Daniel Jacobson offers strong criticisms against moralism

(Jacobson 1997; Jacobson 2005; Jacobson 2008). However, he offers little in the way
of positive argument in favor of immoralism, and so I take up this task (in Eaton 2012).
First I delineate a particular kind of case that I, following Hume, call a "Rough Hero"
work. These are works that solicit strong moral disapproval of, but at the same time
sympathy, affection or admiration for, its immoral characters. Next I argue that such
works are aesthetically good precisely because they solve a very interesting artistic
problem, namely to get the audience to feel things that it is strongly disinclined to feel.
Further, this problem is worth solving in that the state of ambivalence produced by

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 A.W. EATON

such works makes them deeply compelling, where the power to compel is understood
�s an important aesthetic property. My general conclusion, then, is: an intrinsically
Immoral artwork that succeeds in making its target audience adopt its immoral perspective is
for this reason and to this extent both morally bad and aesthetically good.
The view has been criticized by Carroll (Carroll 2013b), who rejects both parts of the
argument; that is, he rejects the idea that the Rough Hero is in fact morally flawed, and
he argues that even if these characters were morally flawed, this would not constitute an
aesthetic achievement. I reply to Carroll in the same issue (Eaton 20 13).

4.3 Jacobson Anti• Theoretical View

Although Jacobson is often taken to be a proponent of immoralism, he repudiates this

label when interpreted strictly. On this point Jacobson writes:

an "ism" implies a theory . . . [and] there is no true theory of the relation

between moral and aesthetic value, although there are of course some true
propositions about it, such as the weak claim and its immoralist counterpart.
(2006, 346)

"The weak claim" referred to here is Noel Carroll's formulation of moderate moralism
which Carroll summarizes thus: "sometimes a moral defect in an artwork can count as
an aesthetic defect, or, as Hume would say, a blemish" (Carroll 1998b). Carroll also
expresses openness to the notion that there are "immoral artworks that are aesthetically
commendable because of their moral defectiveness," though, as noted above, he doubts
that there are many good examples and he explicitly rejects those offered by Eaton
(Carroll 2000, 379- 380). The "immoralist counterpart" to this weak claim would be that
sometimes a moral defect in an artwork can count as an aesthetic merit.

These "weak claims" amount to precisely the view to which Jacobson adheres:
"In fact, my own view is simply that a moral defect of an artwork can figure as
an aesthetic merit: I expressly allow that it can also be an aesthetic flaw or
aesthetically irrelevant (Jacobson 1997)."
(Jacobson 2005, 346)

This does not count as a theory �ecause a theory, to Jacobson's mind, must be "a general
thesis about the relation of moral and aesthetic value" that gives an account of the
"systematic difference between the role that moral defects and virtues of an artwork play
in constituting aesthetic value" (Jacobson 2006, 346). While I agree with Jacobson that
aesthetics does not admit of invariant generalizations supporting counterfactuals, this is
an overly narrow criterion of "theory," one that many respectable theories in the special
sciences would not meet. 21

5 Problems for Further Research

While the question of relationship between a literary work's moral value and its aes·
thetic value has received a lot of attention from Anglophone philosophers in recent
years, problems and unanswered questions nevertheless remain.

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 LITERATURE AND MORALITY

For instance, there is a question of the compatibility, or lack thereof, of the various
positions. While Gaut adamantly denies that a moral flaw can make a positive aesthetic
contribution to a work, Carroll, as noted above, has expressed openness to the idea­
although in practice he has yet to acknowledge a single case (Carroll 2013a; Eaton 201 3).
Further, both Jacobson and Eaton see their views as compatible with some form of
moralism (although, as explained above, Jacobson rejects any "ism"), and Kieran at
least used to argue for a form of moralism. It may be a mistake, then, to describe the
various positions as"competitors," although how exactly they may fit together has yet
to be explained.
Another important question that, as far as I know, has received no attention is why
the direction of influence between the moral and the aesthetic should be one-way.
That is, why should a work's moral value affect its aesthetic value-however we are
to conceive of this influence-but not the other way around? Might a work be
morally improved by its aesthetic merits, or by its aesthetic demerits? Or might a work
be morally diminished by its aesthetic merits, or by its aesthetic demerits? These questions
deserve attention, and where asymmetries are found they must be explained.

Notes
This view was first put to me by Ted Cohen, who continually worried that moral criticism of artworks,
by those like his colleagues Wayne Booth and Martha Nussbaum, rested on a mistake: namely, mistaking
judgments about what is represented for judgments about the representation itself. People but not things,
he used to say, are the proper objects of moral judgment. A perhaps different kind of skeptic is Noel
Carroll's "radical autonomist" ( Carroll 1996 ) , a position that has been criticized as untenable
{Giovannelli 2007, 1 1 8-1 19).
2 A few notable exceptions to this dominant focus on humanism are (Currie 1995; Jacobson 1996;
Jacobson 1997).
3 There is debate about whether Aristotle in fact conceived of catharsis as purgation. See (Lear 1992) for
an alternative understanding of catharsis.
4 This is not true for the interpretive-teleological question of weather a work aims to so lead its audience.
However, the interpretive-teleological question depends on the empirical question, for if a work aimed
to get its audiences to imitate in a way that is not consistent with the way that its target audience
actually does imitate, then such a work would be, practically speaking, benign.
5 Although she does not focus on literature's capacity to produce thought experiments, Tamar Szab6
Gendler's work on the capacity of thought experiments to yield rationally justified conclusions may be
of use here (Gendler 2013, part I).
6 There is some debate about the mechanism of this imagining. Currie is a proponent of so-called
simulation theory, while Carroll is strongly critical (Currie 1 995; Carroll 2000, 3 7 3 ).
7 For a criticism of Kieran, see {Eaton 2012, section V).
8 Here are just a few examples. "And if fictions are aids to the imagination, they may lead indirectly to
knowledge" {Currie 1 998, 161). "Art can amplify our morally relevant powers of perceptual discrimination"
(Carroll 2000, 367).
9 I use "prescribe" here for the sake ofconvenience. One can substitute "calls for," "solicits," or similar concepts
so long as they capture the normative idea that the work is aiming to produce a certain kind of response.
10 They do provide anecdotal evidence of their own experience, but we ought to discount this because,
Currie insists: "Everything we know about our understanding of ourselves suggests that we are not very
good at knowing how we got to be the kind of people we are."
11 Among other things, Currie cites {Kahneman 201 3 ) , who provides an enormous body of evidence to
this effect.
12 Carroll, for instance, understands the difference between the two positions to lie in their strength. He
writes, "Ethicism maintains that certain kinds of ethical failings in an artwork are always aesthetic defects
and should be counted as such in an all-things-considered judgment of the work qua artwork. Moderate
moralism contends that only some of the relevant ethical defects in artworks can also be aesthetic defects

447
 A.W. EATON

and must be weighed that way in all-things-considered judgments" (Carroll 2000, 374-375). Gaut
accepts this formulation of his view but insists that it makes clear that ethicism is no stronger than
moderate moralism; rather, both views hold that only in certain cases do ethical defects count against a
work's aesthetic value. Gaut claims that the difference between the two views lies in their proposed
conditions of aesthetic relevance (Gaut 2009, 49-50). This strikes me as the right take on the two views,
though unlike Gaut, I think that the distinction works in Carroll's favor. Below I use Jacobson's criticism
to show exactly how these conditions of aesthetic relevance differ and argue that Carroll's view proves
to more tenable and subtle and also resistant to Jacobson's criticism.
13 By "homophobic disgust" I mean that the imagined work prescribes that we feel disgust at the characters
because they are gay.
14 Although Gaut (Gaut 2009, 237-239) mentions Jacobson's 1997 article, Gaut does not actually engage
with this argument, as Jacobson himself notes (Jacobson 2008 ). In his treatment of ethicism, Carroll also
discusses Jacobson's objection, but, like Gaut, he appears to miss the point (Carroll 2000, 375-376).
15 Here Carroll could come to the rescue. Carroll insists that the moral blemishes he's interested in are
"structural" features of the work (Carroll 1996, 232-233). This qualification is important because it
excludes factors extraneous to the work; e.g. a fact about the judge or the circumstances in which she
encounters the work. While Carroll's approach seems right, as I explain below, the qualification does not
forestall Jacobson's objection.
16 This is exactly how some moralists put it. For instance, in reference to Triumph of the Will Kendall
Walton writes: "If the work's obnoxious message does not destroy its aesthetic value, it nevertheless
renders it morally inaccessible. That must count as an aesthetic as well as a moral defect" (Walton and
Tanner 1994, 34).
17 For this reason, Jacobson argues, the ethicist's moral sensitivity can actually make her a bad judge by
blinding her to a work's potentially artistically valuable features (Jacobson 1997, 1 4 1 ) .
18 I discuss Kieran's view in greater detail in (Eaton 201 2).
19 Jacobson puts the same point especially well when he says that such a work can provide the "pre­
requisite[s] of non-dogmatic ethical debate" (Jacobson 1996, 335). He makes a similar point in
(Jacobson 1997, 193-4).
20 This is reminiscent of Gaut's discussion of Lolita, where he argues that although the work appears
immoral, on closer inspection we see that it is morally salutary in that it teaches us "something about the
complexity of moral and psychological judgments, of the need for fine discriminations of feelings and
judgement, and of the seductive powers of art" (Gaut 2009, 201 ) .
21 For instance, i t i s widely acknowledged i n genetics that Mendel's laws admit of exceptions and are what
some call ceteris paribus laws. Such laws abound in other special sciences such as biology, psychology, and
economics. Some, like Nancy Cartwright, argue that even physics does not admit of exceptionless laws
(How The Laws of Physics Lie, Oxford University Press, 1983). For a helpful overview of ceteris paribus
laws, see Reutlinger, Alexander, Schurz, Gerhard and Huttemann, Andreas, "Ceteris Paribus Laws," The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 201 1 Edition) , Edward N. Zalta ( ed. ), http://plato.stanford.edu/
archives/spr20 1 1/entries/ceteris-paribus/ ( accessed August 1 2 , 2015).

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