Eileen John on Art and Morality

Nigel Warburton (0:02)

This is Aesthetics Bites, a series for Philosophy Bites with me Nigel Warburton and me David Edmonds. Aesthetics Bites is made in association with the London Aesthetics Forum and made possible by a grant from the British Society of Aesthetics.

SPEAKER_2 (0:17)

What is the link between art and morality?

And can art teach us anything about ethics? Eileen John of Warwick University believes it can.

Nigel Warburton (0:27)

Eileen John, welcome to Aesthetics Bites.

Eileen John (0:30)

I'm very happy to be here.

Nigel Warburton (0:32)

The topic we're going to focus on is art and morality.

Now I know you're particularly interested in literature. It'd be really interesting to explore how particular works of literature are informative and allow us to explore moral questions. So can we just begin by picking out an example of a literary work that introduces moral questions?

Eileen John (0:53)

Yeah, let me say I take art and morality to be really great interacting spheres, but they do different things. They have different commitments. I'll give you an example of a work of drama, Ibsen's play The Wild Duck, that I think is a good example of art helping us learn about morality, taking morality as a subject matter for art and going after it in a really funny and engrossing way.

Nigel Warburton (1:25)

So for those of us who aren't familiar with that play, could you just broadly sketch what goes on there?

Eileen John (1:30)

Yes, I don't want to spoil the plot of the play, but it's a wonderful family drama and it has a central character who tries to be a moral perfectionist.

He wants to live by the perfect moral law. For example, thou shalt not lie.

So, he trundles out this perfect moral principle and basically destroys his family because of it.

I'm laughing, it's actually a very moving and disturbing play. But in his family, he wants this moral perfection to be enacted. Meanwhile, his wife turns out to be, I would say, a more morally admirable figure in the play because she realizes you can't inevitably sustain a family without doing such things as lying. So, she is in a way a figure of moral imperfection and yet she is also the figure who does a better job of holding her family together.

Nigel Warburton (2:40)

So, is this because life is messy and complex and a Kantian moral framework just doesn't map onto it? Is that what the message of the play is?

Eileen John (2:49)

That is one nice way of summing up what Ibsen is helping us to see or at least helping us to wonder about.

I would say most works of art that are, in my terms, about morality are question raising. They're not inevitably going to show you this is the philosophically definitive view to have of morality. But I do think Ibsen is taking on not just Kant but other moral thinkers who would say you can trundle out your moral principles and be done with it.

Nigel Warburton (3:26)

This reminds me a bit of Ludwig Wittgenstein's approach to life where he was adamant that he shouldn't tell any lies and he hurt a lot of people I think in the process because he wasn't compromising.

Eileen John (3:37)

Well, yeah, I think this idea of the uncompromising moral agent is a great target for exploration in art and in literature in particular because moral principles are also kind of beautiful. They do appeal to us. We are drawn to the perfectly resolved moral position.

But the artist is someone who has the chance to make us step back and assess even that perfection. One of the valuable things about art is that it allows us to step outside our normal set of commitments as friend, as employee, as family member, and examine and experiment with what morality asks of us.

Nigel Warburton (4:27)

I'm interested to know why you couldn't just have an anecdote of something that was true. So, for instance, Wittgenstein was horrible to a young American visitor who was singing in German. He said, look, you have to excuse my German, he said, I couldn't possibly. And just stormed off. Abominable behaviour to somebody who was so vulnerable.

Maintaining his integrity. It's the same kind of thing. It's somebody concerned about being honest to themselves. They couldn't honestly have said, I loved the way you pronounce Schubert's song there.

So what's the difference then between a true story like that and a work of literature or art?

Eileen John (5:00)

I guess I think there is greater freedom in the context of the work of art and our response to it. So when someone's telling you about the rudeness of a real person, you probably have a somewhat limited set of concerns in that exchange.