Question:

Are the arts (performing, visual, plastic, etc.) ethically valuable outside of being used to make an ethical statements of one sort or another?

Response from Sarah Dimick, student

This question appears to be asking whether or not the arts, which here at Carleton would include literature, studio art, music, theater, film and many other venues of expression, can help a person to live an ethical life. It is often assumed that the arts are simply a form of entertainment without ethical implications, but in reality the arts touch a deeper layer of ethics than most subjects reach.

Pictures of irises or ancient love sonnets may not initially seem to have any bearing on ethics. However, much of living an ethical life depends on a person’s ability to place themselves in someone else’s shoes. A truly ethical person is able to consider situations from all the possible vantage points and make decisions accordingly. The arts are a constant practice in this ability to see life from another perspective. When we read a novel we are immersed in someone else’s thoughts for hours and are forced to grapple with their statements and assumptions. When we look at a painting we understand how some people focus more on detail or colors while others concentrate on texture and brushstrokes. When we watch a play or a film we are immersed in an unfamiliar world that we gradually become a part of. Furthermore, creating a piece of art that is from another vantage point, for example a male author writing a novel from a female’s perspective, forces an artist to become another human, to understand why their character perceives the world as they do.

The arts also have a great power over our society. Consider books such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin that lit fire to the debate over slavery, Picasso’s painting Guernica that is universally recognized as the twentieth century symbol of the antiwar sentiment, or plays like this fall term’s production of The Exonerated that allows college students who will most likely never meet a death row inmate to hear a man’s innermost thoughts as he waits for a lethal injection knowing all the time that he is innocent. Even artwork that seems apolitical may create political stances: for example, a picturesque oil painting of a waterfall may cause a viewer to become more concerned about environmentalism. On the other hand, consider the fact that our U.S. military sometimes broadcasts violent rock music through soldiers’ helmets while they are in combat. Oscar Wilde in A Picture of Dorian Gray argues, “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.” Regardless of whether a piece of art in and of itself is moral or amoral, we must admit that the actions which artwork inspires do have an ethical bearing.

Arts are also the best means the public masses have to participate in ethical reflection. Very few people have been trained in philosophy, and even fewer would pick up a treatise on the multilayered impacts of dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima, but hundreds of little grade school kids across America read Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes every year, and for the rest of their lives they will reflect very carefully on that story before supporting any policy relating to nuclear weapons. Artwork allows ethical issues to be dispersed to the general public, and forces us to deal with seemingly abstract ethical questions on a very personal, human level. If your lofty ethical beliefs do not hold up on the basic level of human experience that artwork offers us, it’s probably time to think through them again. For instance, someone who admires Shakespeare’s love sonnets and is firmly against gay marriage might want to consider the fact that many of Shakespeare’s sonnets were written to another man. If one responds to the sentiments of love expressed in the sonnets as something recognizably human and universal, it is hard to claim that the love that inspired them was somehow less valid.

Ultimately, it is this artistic process of walking in another person’s shoes that makes the arts an ethical discipline. Besides our mental extrapolation from day to day interactions with other people, we have no way of entering someone else’s world besides the arts. Someone who is well trained in viewing the world from many standpoints possesses the best training we can give a modern ethicist.