commendable attitudes, it is to that extent aesthetically meritorious.”^40
According to both Kieran and Gaut, then, it is a central function of art not
simply to be decorative or entertaining, but to promote imaginative under-
standing of people, their styles of interest, and their successes and failures in
pursuing their interests–just as Karen Finley, Andres Serrano, and writers of
narrative fictions typically undertake to do. It does this by engaging and
clarifying–as Aristotle saw–the emotions of audiences toward both the
subject matter presented and the artist’s manipulations of the materials of a
medium.^41 If a work succeeds in such engagement and clarification, then it
is, according to Kieran and Gaut, to that extent always artistically better; if it
fails, it is to that extent always artistically worse.
Gaut has developed in detail three closely related arguments for this
strong ethicist view. Themoral beautyargument holds that“moral excellence
is a kind of beauty of character; thus the beauty of the manifested author’s
moral character partly constitutes the beauty of the work.”^42 Here the
manifested author is the actual author of the textas he or she has specifically
developed the themes, forms, imagery, diction, and structure of a particular text.
Hence an actual author might display quite a different character, both in
the rest of life and in other works, from that manifested in a given work,
while still remaining a real author, not a merely postulated or implied one.
As Gaut notes in commenting onMiddlemarch, George Eliot’s“ethical stance
pervades the work’s narrative structure, its descriptions of characters and
situations, its style, its authorial tone and persona.”^43 In reading both it and
other works of literature, we are essentially imaginatively attending to the
persons and incidents described through the lens of the manifested author’s
moral sensibility. A manifested author’s sensibility that evaluates the per-
sons and incidents presented aptly, both emotionally and morally, will
always be a virtue, all other things being equal, and one that evaluates them
inaptly will, all other things being equal, be a vice. Thecognitivistargument
holds that“a work’s capacity to teach us (including about moral matters) is,
under certain conditions [e.g. when integrated into the style of the work and
(^40) Berys Gaut,“The Ethical Criticism of Art,”inAesthetics and Ethics, ed. Levinson, p. 182.
(^41) See Chapter 8 above.
(^42) Gaut,Art, Emotion and Ethics(Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 227. See Chapter 6 above
for the full development of this argument.
(^43) Gaut,“Art and Ethics,”inThe Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, eds. Gaut and Lopes
(London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 341–52 at p. 345.
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