success is better described as the achievement of inviting and clarifying com-
plex emotional attitudes toward complex human characters and projects,
where it is difficult to reduce these complex attitudes to any single and simple
moral message. The achievement of the clarification of complex emotional-
ethical attitudes remains, however, as such an artistic achievement, not some-
thing that is artistically neutral, even where, and perhaps especially where, it
is difficult to sum up the work of clarification in a formula of moral thought.
Carroll, Gaut, and Kieran, along with other theorists such as Wordsworth,
Tolstoy, and Collingwood, and Wayne Booth, Martha Nussbaum, and me,
among many others, regard the ethical significance of art as a matter of the
clarification of what it is appropriate to think and feel, in relation to specific,
interesting, and difficult cases that are held before our attention by the work of
art. Amy Mullin has usefully distinguished the successful work of art’sinvita-
tion of what she calls“morally significant imagining”from the didactic
purveying of a sound moral message.^51 Kieran emphasizes the importance of
“imaginative understanding and its cultivation of moral insight”into particular
cases, not simply coming away from a work with a moral philosophy in one’s
mind or pocket.^52 Carroll calls his position on this issueclarificationism.He
distinguishes between the acquisition of new propositional moralknowledge,
whichshouldnot happen and typically doesnot happen in our encounter witha
successful work, and the deepening of moralunderstanding,whichisacentral
function of art.^53 Understanding is, among other things, connected with par-
ticulars; it involves“acapacitytosee.”^54 Evolving understanding, including the
exploration and clarification of emotion and attitude, is an aspect of engage-
ment with a work, not a consequence of it.^55 Wayne Booth observes that we
engage with values in reading“byexperiencingthem in an immeasurably rich
context.”^56 Adapting a phrasefromHenry James, Martha Nussbaum claims that
reading complex works of narrative literature can make us“finely aware and(^51) Amy Mullin,“Evaluating Art: Morally Significant Imagining Versus Moral Soundness,”
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism60, 2 (spring 2002), pp. 137–48.
(^52) Kieran,“Art, Imagination, and the Cultivation of Morals,”p. 348A.
(^53) Noël Carroll,“Art, Narrative, and Moral Understanding,”inAesthetics and Ethics, ed.
Levinson, pp. 126–60 at pp. 142–44. See also Noël Carroll,“The Wheel of Virtue: Art,
Literature, and Moral Knowledge,”Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism60, 1 (winter 2002).
(^54) Carroll,“Art, Narrative,”p. 145. (^55) Ibid., p. 145.
(^56) Wayne C. Booth,The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction(Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1988), p. 70.
238 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art