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QUESTION #2
'All art is ethically committed, whether overtly or covertly.' Discuss.
Discuss
When you are told to “discuss” a statement, your essay must nevertheless take a position. You
should say whether you agree or disagree with that statement, given some understanding of the
terms involved – you cannot merely rehearse considerations for and against accepting the
statement without coming to some conclusion. In some cases, including this one, a reasonable
amount of discussion will be needed to establish what we should take the terms to mean.
A part of discussing the statement may also include considering whether the statement is more
plausible if we put some restrictions on it, or whether some other related statement might be more
plausible (example given below).
Central words
All: The statement is about all art, so a first thing to do here may be to think of which kind of art
it would be least plausible to make this claim about. How could Chopin’s preludes be ethically
committed, for example? If we can dismiss the idea that the claim could be true of absolutely all
art quite quickly, then we will be able to move on to restricted versions of the statement. For
example, perhaps such a claim about all narrative artworks could be more plausible.
Ethically committed: This is the central notion in need of clarification. An answer to this
question must consider what it would mean for art to be ethically committed, and should
preferably consider a few different ways to understand this notion. One obvious way for an
artwork to be ethically committed would be for it to make explicit moral claims. On the other
hand, an artwork may call for its audience to react with ‘moral’ emotions, such as admiration,
blame or sympathy. Could calling for such emotions in response to certain situations be a kind of
ethical commitment?
Both of these suggestions offer ways that ethical commitment might arise through the content of
an artwork. So is ethical commitment necessarily tied to the content of an artwork? Or could it
come about in other ways? If the latter, perhaps this suggests a way that even a piece of music
might be ethically committed.
Overt and Covert: Since these words are used in the statement, an answer also needs to mention
them, and should distinguish ways for an artwork to be more overtly or covertly ethically
committed. The first two suggestions above might be taken as suggestions for what counts as
overt and covert ethical commitment. Alternatively, if we think that ethical commitments can
arise other than through an artwork’s content, perhaps that will provide another way for such
commitment to be covert.
Less central words
This question includes the word ‘art’, and the definition of art is a controversial philosophical
topic. However, to discuss it in detail here would take us too far away from the central focus of
this question. We have lots of paradigm examples of art (Chopin’s preludes, Dostoevsky’s
novels, Turner’s paintings, Shakespeare’s plays) and we can use these when considering what
this claim could mean, and whether it might be plausible.