Being blamed for something is common. Maybe you left the window open, or lost the TV remote again. Maybe you committed a string of negligent homicides by leaving nails all over the highway right at that sharp corner where all the accidents happen. Maybe you forgot to turn the TV off and cost your household an additional $0.14 in electricity. We all do silly things for which we are, inevitably, responsible. A common problem, though, is distinguishing between causal and moral responsibility. Causal responsibility is just causing something to happen - the toaster in the bathtub might cause the water to be lethal, for example, but it’s not morally responsible. Moral responsibility, while tricky to define in a sentence, is basically being morally guilty, having a moral wrong be your fault. A toaster cannot be guilty for anything, since it can’t do anything wrong. But you, having put the toaster in the bathtub, might be morally responsible for any ensuing deaths.

Fashion Crimes?

There’s another kind of dastardly crime at issue that I have only hinted at: fashion crimes. They’re common, perhaps too common. Fashion crimes do not seem to be moral crimes, though. It’s hard to say that someone is doing a moral wrong by wearing a button-down shirt with sweatpants, though it’s really easy to see that they’re doing a wrong. What gives?

Aesthetic Responsibility

Aesthetics deals with all things beauty. Like epistemology deals with knowledge and the law deals with the incompetent, aesthetics is a field that encompasses art, music, food, and anything else that’s good for the senses. Since you might be morally responsible, it’s not a stretch that you might also be aesthetically responsible. In other words, you might be aesthetically blameworthy for a heinous fashion crime, or praiseworthy for creating this, as Botticelli is:

The asymmetry puzzle

There’s a puzzle with aesthetic responsibility, though. It seems that in most cases, we default to aesthetic praise, while we also in most cases default to moral blame. Let me explain a little more. First, moral blame is far more common (and far more discussed) than praise. When someone does something wrong, everybody and their aunt’s goldfish hears about it. When somebody does something nice, it hardly spreads - almost like everyone expects people to do good and is intrigued when they do not. Yet in exactly the same way, aesthetic praise is far more common, and fashion crimes spread very slowly outside of the hallowed halls of high school. We have all heard of Gordon Ramsey, of Leonardo (Da Vinci and DiCaprio) and maybe even of Vera Wang. We have not heard of the least fashionably dressed 30 year old, nor of the worst cook in southern British Columbia. The most we can hope for is to have heard of Canada’s Worst Driver. Likewise, we have internal databases of the different kinds of morally horrible people (and politicians!) that we have met or know of, but trying to find many people beyond Mother Teresa that most people think of as morally virtuous is nearly impossible.

The asymmetry answer

Hopefully I’ve convinced you to look out for fashion crimes and moral virtue, lest you be like one of the sheep out there in the world. Let me now convince you of something else: we are more keen to morally blame because moral goodness is expected, and we are more keen to aesthetically praise because aesthetic or mediocrity, which some would contend is literally the worst badness is expected. It is because we expect it to be far more uncommon for people to be morally evil that we notice it so much more, and because we expect people not to be aesthetically great that we notice it more. In fact, apart from fashion crimes and poisonous food, it is very difficult to aesthetically blame someone for something. Perhaps we pity them for their lack of taste or skill, but unless their creation is extremely unpleasant it is seemingly inappropriate to aesthetically blame.

Praise for the artist

What do we praise when we do aesthetically praise? The first candidate for recognition is the artist. Whether it’s Wolfgang Puck or John Williams, we can easily see when an artist’s creations are worthy of praise. We might praise them because of the emotional or sensational feeling that they produce in us - something that might be called a reactive attitude. Likewise, ‘artists’ that produce awful, painful, aesthetically ruinous art might inspire the kind of reactive attitude that causes us to blame them.

Praise for the art?

What about art? I comment here that if we do praise art, it would likely be because of the reactive attitude it inspires in us, but there is no agent to attribute that attitude to. Instead, the art itself might be praised as marvellous or beautiful, being capable of inspiring such a reaction, but there’s no point telling the art about it!

But wait - what if the art is a person? The subjects of art can clearly be people. What if the art is necessarily performed, or displayed through, a person? The art of wine tasting, for example, is something we can appreciate even if we don’t appreciate the wine itself. A dance has two arts - the art of the performance and the art of the choreographer. We can appreciate one independently of the other, and those that are more aesthetically broad can appreciate both at the same time!

Praise for you, and you, and you

It turns out that if we do praise artists for the reactive attitudes they inspire in us, and that praising because of this attitude is the right thing to do, then we can rightly praise anything and anyone that inspires the right sort of attitude in us. Conversely, we can blame anyone and anything that inspires the wrong sort of attitude in us.

As it turns out, that is something we do. While it might seem odd that we could praise a canvas or blame a tuna sandwich, when it comes to aesthetic responsibility, we can. When the art that we praise or blame is a person, we can also expect them to understand that praise or blame. But when we morally praise or blame someone, we expect to hold them morally accountable - to be rewarded or punished for their act, to be encouraged to keep it up or to quit it forever. Can we expect this accountability for aesthetic responsibility?

Change your ugly ways?

Susan Wolf, in her 2016 Amherst lectures, argued that aesthetic responsibility is not the accountability sort, but instead what she calls the attributive sort: that art says something about the artist, and so the artist is “responsible” for it in the sense that there is a close connection - more than causal - between the identity of the artist and the work. I’ve suggested here a different sort of aesthetic responsibility entirely, rooted in reactive attitudes.

One common thread, however, is that I do not think we can ask art to change. When we blame it, we are responding to the attitude it induces in us, but we are not telling it that it should be better. When a bad artist produces blameworthy art in front of us, we do not tell them to do better but instead we disengage. This is because - as Wolf suggests - there is a deep connection between the artist’s identity and the art. To ask an artist to change their art is to ask them to change their identity, which we know is not our place to do. When we praise art, we do not tell the artist that it is meritorious to have the identity that they do, but that their efforts in expressing it have paid off.

The art-dentity connection

This discussion leads us to the point I seek to make - if art truly reflects the identity of the artist, then our attitudes in response to art might most profitably be explained as reactions to artists’ expressions of their identity. Bad art might reflect a bad identity (if that’s possible, which is unlikely) or it reflects a misguided and bad expression of what would otherwise be good. Mediocrity might just reflect a lack of real expression altogether, while truly good art is a true, excellent expression of an artist’s identity. This is why holding people to account for their aesthetic creations, unlike moral action, is not the sort of thing we do. Instead, we ask people to gain knowledge, technique, or skill in achieving what they are trying to achieve.

So what?

This raises many good questions, which I do not have the space or time to answer. If aesthetic responsibility is about expression, then how do we seem to know when expression is truly good? Is it just when it gets through to us? This might explain how misunderstood artists are only appreciated decades or centuries after their time. A big, long-standing question is why do we value art at all? If it’s really so closely tied to identity, it might just be an extension of our value for people - for their unique identities, and the effort they put into expressing them.

This post is a response to a presentation given by Chrysogonus Okwenna on aesthetic responsibility, and includes reference to Susan Wolf’s 2016 Amherst Lecture on Aesthetic Responsibility: Wolf, Susan. “Aesthetic Responsibility.” The Amherst Lecture in Philosophy 11 (2016): 1–25. http://www.amherstlecture.org/wolf2016/.