In a stimulating article (”Wilde and Morality” in Philosophy Now 65 [Jan-Feb 08] 28-30) Peter Benson explores the relationship of Wilde’s classic The Portrait of Dorian Gray to morality. In the preface to this book Oscar Wilde provocatively claimed,
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.
In The Scots Observer Wilde maintained:
An artist has no ethical sympathies at all. Virtue and wickedness are to him simply what the colours on his palette are to the painter.
Indeed, in a letter to The St Jame’s Gazette he proposed that Dorian Gray was a story with a moral, namely that
All excess, as well as renunciation, brings its own punishment.
However, here Wilde remains true to his belief that the spheres of art and ethics are absolutely distinct and separate. For the moral expressed in Dorian Gray, along with all other moral values that might be expressed in a book are
simply among the material which an artist may use to create aesthetic effects (Benson).
Wilde, like a painter using colours on his palette, makes use of the moral norms he knows his readers to have in developing the character of Dorian Gray so that the reader is brought to see him as corrupt and deserving of his suicidal fate.
Still, Benson accepts Wilde’s basic thesis. While a book can have immoral effects, and while it can contain moral and immoral acts, a novel is not moral or immoral in itself. Here Benson argues that only human beings can be moral or immoral in themselves. Indeed, Benson reasons that it is the aesthetic reader than the moralistic reader whose approach to the text purifies it, since this approach defuses in advance any possible immoral effect the book might otherwise have. He sardonically concludes,
To be a decadent aesthete, therefore, is to preserve oneself from moral stain.
This thesis, however, presupposes a sharp distinction between the author or creator and the work produced. But once a book or other art form is viewed as an expression of the author’s own thought then the work concerned, now viewed as a whole and not merely in terms of particular content, may indeed be adjudged moral, immoral or morally neutral, depending on the extent to which it serves to fulfil the author’s own moral agenda.
For example, I take it that J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels are morally neutral. Of course, there are those who have criticised the books as encouraging children to entertain the occult, with all its dangers. It is a matter of debate whether these books have this moral effect or not, but I assume, in the absence of any compelling evidence to the contrary, that there is no intent on J.K. Rowling’s part to motivate children to engage in occult activities. Therefore, I conclude that, as per Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, this is simply good story telling, which involves moral content, but which as a total work is morally neutral. I also read Dorian Gray the same way. The very fact that there is retribution for Dorian Gray presents a formidable problem for those who would argue the book is immoral and, as we have seen, for Wilde the moral content of the book is akin to colours he uses from his palette.
On the other hand, Machiavelli’s The Prince is an immoral book, for whatever its artistic merit, it is plainly the author’s intent to encourage a means-justifies-ends worldview, endorsing the use of power to cynically manipulate people.
At the other extreme stands John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a thoroughly moral work, since it is the author’s intent, through this work of art, to move his readers to live lives which honour God.
Of course, this latter example, perhaps more clearly, but no less than the second, raises the question of Moral or Immoral to Whom? it is plainly possible, on the basis I’ve outlined, for a work to be regarded as moral from the author’s perspective yet immoral from the reader’s perspective. But this in turn raises the question of the basis of moral judgment. If, as Christians believe, there is an external standard, the revealed will of God, then it is possible, in absolute terms, if the author’s or creator’s moral intent is known, to refer to a book or film or other art form, as an expression of the author’s mind, as being either moral, immoral or morally neutral.
Posted May 15, 2008
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