LITMIR.BIZ

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because in morality there are thought to be factors that weigh in the direction of permissibility or impermissibility or, other things equal, make an act morally worse than another. This is one reason why thought experiments can be good predictors of how one should deal with real-life cases. But there do not seem to be comparable factors that at least weigh in the direction of one artwork being good or better than another. That we admire the blue in one good artwork does not mean that the same blue in another artwork will weigh in favor of its being good. Perhaps properties at a very high level of generality, such as effective composition or dynamism, could lead us to think that an artwork would be better than another. Even this seems unlikely. The goodness of an artwork does not seem to be predictable from a list of its qualities in the way the permissibility of an act is. But perhaps this is only true when non-artists consider these qualities (even at a high level of generality). Is it possible that (as some have thought) an artist can know that once instantiated in the real world the artwork she has in mind as good will be good?

      3 Comparing Danto on Ethics to Wollheim on Art

      A. Surprisingly, in his own discussion of the permissibility of certain acts of killing and harming (see below), Danto seems to have adopted a view similar to the one Wollheim adopted about Danto’s indiscernibles. Consider the following excerpt from Danto’s consideration of whether assassination could ever be morally permissible:⁵

Because he was a monster, Hitler may be considered too extreme a case upon which to base a philosophical analysis of assassination. Consider torture … I am utterly opposed to the use of torture, but I suppose cases can be imagined, along Dostoevskian lines, in which one’s stand against torture might be weakened because it is a dramatically lesser evil. Suppose a man has, but refuses to divulge, information which would save millions of innocent lives … I do not know what I would say if torture were proposed. There is no morality for extreme situations and it is a mistake to argue from extreme cases to routine ones. In any event, it is not true that torture in the extreme case is justified. Patterns of justification cannot be designed for extreme cases; it is not that torture is justified, but that under such wild circumstances “right” and “wrong” do not apply. It is, thus, no justification of cannibalism that cases are available in which cannibalism seemed the only alternative to an agonizing death. I could understand a man who resisted the opportunity to survive, and I could understand a man who yielded. Extreme cases warp the concept of a policy, and Hitler’s seems precisely to be an extreme case. No argument from it is available, not even if one could secure the assent of every moral person that the killing of Hitler would have been a dramatically lesser evil than the deaths of millions of people directly traceable to his policies. I do not say a way cannot be paved from the extreme case to the practice. … All I am saying is that a way has to be paved, that the inference from the extreme case to the routine is fallacious without supplementary defense and then the supplementary defense eliminates the relevance of the extreme paradigm. … Is assassination, therefore, never justifiable, or at best not unjustifiable because of the moral structurelessness of the extreme case? Is it “beyond good and evil” only when the intended victim is a monster like Hitler? … Routinization of assassination is … consistent only with the devaluation of all values. … Accordingly, it can only be consistently [sic] with any true system of values that assassination is exceptional and hence extreme.⁶

      This position about right and wrong action has echoes of what Wollheim says about the conceptual issue of art versus non-art. Consider the case of the egalitarian artist who exhibits the found red canvas (#5 in my list above of Danto’s indiscernibles): (i) A Wollheimian might say (applying Danto’s words about assassination to #5) that this is an extreme case, “and it is a mistake to argue from extreme cases to routine ones … inference from the extreme case to the routine is fallacious without supplementary defense and then the supplementary defense eliminates the relevance of the extreme paradigm” (to determining what is art). (ii) Wollheim thinks it is revealing that “art” might be applied to #5 with a degree of reluctance or indecision that Danto ignores. However, Danto takes note of indecision in the case of the permissibility of torture or cannibalism. Of an extreme case, he says, “I could understand a man who resisted … and one who yielded.” Wollheim might use the same words to describe his response to deciding #5 to be art. (iii) Wollheim might say of #5 (using Danto’s words about torture), “it is not that one is justified in saying … [#5 is art] … but that under such wild circumstances ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ do not apply.” (iv) Wollheim might say that a concept of art for ordinary cases derived from #5 being art “is then consistent only with the devaluation of values” (or concepts, in the case of art); “accordingly it can only be consistently [sic] with any true system of values” (or concepts) that #5 “is exceptional and hence extreme.”

      B. Is Danto right in what he says (seemingly à la Wollheim) about assassination, cannibalism, and torture? I do not think so. Here are some reasons that pertain to torture.⁷

      1 The fact that one could be reluctant to think that torture is sometimes morally permissible, or that one could understand both the person who said it was and the one who said it wasn’t, does not mean that torture isn’t in fact sometimes permissible (e.g., all things considered justified).

      2 The fact that a type of act that is usually wrong would be done in circumstances where the consequences of its not being done would be extremely bad does not mean that the act is now “beyond good and evil.” Thomas Nagel thinks that cases like the one Danto imagines, in which we would torture an innocent in order to save the world, are “moral blind alleys” in which no matter what we do (torture or not), we act wrongly.8 But doing an all things considered wrong act no matter what we do would obviously not mean that the whole issue was beyond right and wrong (or good and evil). Danto himself thinks that “one’s stand against torture might be weakened because it is a dramatically lesser evil,” though this is not ultimately his final position as he switches to the “beyond good and evil” view.

      3 An alternative view of the “dramatically lesser evil” justification is known as “threshold deontology”: deontological side constraints (on not harming innocents) may permissibly be overridden in some cases when the consequences are bad enough. However, I do not think that this “dramatically lesser evil” argument is the best way to morally analyze most cases of torture, though it may be the way to analyze the so-called Dostoevskian ones in which an innocent who has no responsibility for the threat facing the world must be tortured or killed to save millions.

      4 In cases where the person to be tortured is morally responsible for the threat, there could be other grounds than that torturing him is a “dramatically lesser evil” done to prevent the threat from coming to fruition. For example, Danto describes someone who is refusing to give information that he has that could save many people. This person might not have started the threat facing them; however, he is “letting them die” when he could easily save them (and so has what is called “negative responsibility” for the event). However, if letting die is morally different from killing, this could argue against his having sufficient responsibility for the threat to justify torturing him to prevent it. By contrast, suppose the very person who presented the threat to the world, for example, Hitler, was the person who would have to be tortured to stop the threat from coming to fruition. The argument for the moral permissibility of torturing him is not that it is the dramatically lesser evil, but that Hitler’s wrong act makes him responsible for the threat, and so he is liable to be harmed in order to save his victims. Call this the Responsibility Argument. I think it may succeed.

      5 The Responsibility Argument need not be restricted to cases involving an enormous loss to the world. Consider ordinary cases in which a villain threatens to kill one other person (e.g., he has set a bomb that will go off unless we torture him for the information to stop it). I agree with Danto that we should not rely on the extreme case (in which many lives are at stake) to argue about the ordinary case, but this is consistent with it being correct to use the same type of Responsibility Argument here as in the extreme case: In order to save his potential victim once he has finished setting his bomb, the villain could be liable to suffer at least the sorts of harms that it would be permissible to impose on him while he is establishing his threat in order to stop him doing so.9 Using the Responsibility

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