I began including Noel Carroll’s 1996 essay “Moderate Moralism” (in the British Journal of Aesthetics, and in his essay collection Beyond Aesthetics) in syllabi a few years ago, and my students are very responsive to it, in classroom discussion and in essays that they don’t seem to think of as a chore, but as a chance to relate something from their own history of cultural encounters. And I responded this way too, recounting, and sometimes revisiting, “problematic” works of art and gauging my own response to them.
Think of a spectrum that considers how, in a narrative work of art, the author’s moral outlook is revealed, and how that might affect our response to the “aesthetics” of the work. At one end of the spectrum are what we could call “radical autonomists”, who would claim that morals are simply not a part of how we should ever contemplate a work, that the ideal observer is “disinterested” and brings nothing from the practical world into aesthetic appreciation. “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all,” as Oscar Wilde claimed. At the other far end are the “radical moralists”, where the moral content of art is the primary lens through which we should evaluate art. Think of Plato in Book X of The Republic, or Tolstoy in his essay “What is Art?” (though not Tolstoy in his own great works of fiction.
In the middle of the spectrum we get two more moderate views: “moderate autonomy” would admit that, yes, there can be a moral element in narrative works, and sometimes a moral element that warrants criticism, but that this is a separate thing from considering the aesthetic properties of a work. A moderate autonomist might say, "yes, there is certainly something deeply troubling about the assumptions Woody Allen makes in his film Manhattan, but it remains a beautiful film.” Consider Roger Ebert’s (four star) review of Birth of a Nation:
All serious moviegoers must sooner or later arrive at a point where they see a film for what it is, and not simply for what they feel about it. "The Birth of a Nation" is not a bad film because it argues for evil. Like Riefenstahl’s “The Triumph of the Will,” it is a great film that argues for evil.
And finally, Carroll’s own standpoint of “moderate moralism”, which holds that it is at least possible for the moral element to affect the aesthetic. This is especially true, at least through the examples given by Carroll, when the ethics are “off” in some sense: he cites American Psycho as an example where the author’s attempt to find humor in situations of extreme and cruel violence just doesn’t work, and affects the reader’s (or the viewer’s, for the film) ability to appreciate any craftsmanship in writing (to each his own: The New York Times still thinks the book is pretty hilarious). Another example is presented, in another essay I give to my students, in Chinua Achebe’s “An Image of Africa” in which he claims that the racism inherent in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness prevents it from being a great work of literature; a racist work cannot be great. The problem of Dana Schutz’s painting “Open Casket” (portraying Emmett Till) at the Whitney Biennial in 2017 was not that she was a white artist painting a black subject (any artist is free to create art out of anything they like), but that her painting failed in its lack of gravitas towards its tragic subject matter (see likewise the too-many cases to name regarding the Holocaust as a subject). Carroll notes that any author of a narrative work makes an assumption about how viewers will respond, and will make assumptions about the viewers’ (broadly defined) ethical grounding. When they get that wrong, it jars, and is not easily put aside.
I don’t think there is an argument that can resolve the differences between moderate autonomists and moderate moralists: Roger Ebert is neither demonstrably wrong, nor callous, in saying Birth of a Nation and The Triumph of the Will are great films. He is able to make a separation that I can sometimes make, but not always. When I rewatched Manhattan (a movie I enjoyed and thought very sophisticated when I first saw it, as a teenager for whom New York City was as distant as the Land of Oz, on its first release) for teaching this subject, I found I could not separate the creepiness of Isaac and Tracy’s relationship from the cinematography or music or talented actors or the undeniable wit of Allen. I don’t think anyone is wrong who can make that separation. But I do think the moderate autonomists should give the same consideration to us moderate moralists.
Another implication of moderate moralism is that when someone says they think that the value of art is for its beauty and for our contemplation of it, and not for “instrumental purposes”, as I do in my book, it does not mean that the person has adopted a stance of radical autonomism and “aesthetic distance”. For it is entirely reasonable that our contemplation includes a moral element, that we see the work as a whole.