Abstract

In this paper, I critically examine Berys Gaut’s proposals regarding ethical criticism, that is, regarding the question of whether, and if so how, an ethical evaluation of a work of art can be considered amongst the determinants of the work’s value as art. I critically examine Gaut’s proposed taxonomy on the possible positions on the ethical criticism question as well as his own influential answer to such question: ethicism. My critique focuses on one missing element, I argue, in Gaut’s overall approach and in ethicism as he formulates and defends it: reference to artistic categorization and to the aims and commitments artworks have in virtue of the artistic categories they belong to. I show how reference to artistic categorization facilitates the generation of a more fine-grained taxonomy of positions than the one Gaut proposes. Such taxonomy makes it possible to distinguish between two very different types of positions within what Gaut dubs ‘contextualism’: what I call limited or restricted ethicism and particularism. As an application of this more fine-grained taxonomy, I show how Noël Carroll’s ‘moderate moralism’, which Gaut convincingly claims to be incomplete, need not reduce to either ethicism or contextualism as Gaut claims: the view can also be completed in the direction of a limited or restricted ethicism. As for Gaut’s own proposal, surprisingly it itself proves to have leanings towards particularism, in so far as it delegates the question of the artistic (or aesthetic) relevance of ethical features to case-by-case decisions. Again, reference to artistic categorization would offer Gaut grounds to be less sceptical on the possibility of finding general philosophical principles governing the relevance of ethical features to artistic worth. Further, lack of reference to artistic categorization can be shown to affect Gaut’s claims within all three the arguments he puts forward in defence of ethicism—the moral beauty, the cognitive, and the merited-response argument. I show such claims to be ill founded when not implausible.