Art and Moral Revolution

Abstract

Traditionally, questions about the role of the arts in moral thought have focused on the arts' role in the acquisition of new moral knowledge, the refinement of moral concepts, and the capacity to apply our moral view to particular situations. Here I suggest that there is an importantly different and largely overlooked role for the arts in moral thought: an ability to reconfigure the structure of our moral thought and effect what we might call a revolution in that framework. In this article I explain this distinction between two kinds of change in view, suggest the second type has not been addressed by the extant literature, provide examples of this role, and argue for its importance.Nonetheless, Gibson's suggestion is that literature can flesh out our moral knowledge in a way not so very different from the one described by Carroll. Literature connects abstract and

Recent Work on Moral Revolutions

“…An element of radicality appears in Baker's account when he presents moral revolutions as involving an 'inversion' of morality, 'in which what was once morally commendable or appeared between 2001 and 2021, in the databases Psychology and Behavioural Science Reports and Philosopher's Index. The resulting list of sources on which we focus consists of Appiah (2010), Baker (2019), Eriksen (2019aEriksen ( , 2020, Kitcher (2012Kitcher ( , 2021, Lowe (2019), Pleasants (2018) and Walden (2015). To a lesser extent, we also discuss Buchanan (2020), whose primary focus is not moral revolutions; commenters on Appiah (2010) -for example Kumar and Campbell 2016; and earlier works on the topic of moral revolutions (Parsons 1974, Palmer andSchagrin 1978).…”

“…2 Walden (2015) is one exception: he uses the language of revolution to characterize a type of fundamental, reconfiguring change in the moral view, which could occur at the individual level. Danaher (2018: 4) is another: he characterizes a case in which an individual switch from believing torturing criminals is permissible to believing it is impermissible as a 'personal deontological moral revolution'.…”

“…Relatedly, when Buchanan (2020: 133) argues that there has been a revolutionary shift to viewing non-human animals as having moral standing, he invokes a notion of depth: he writes that this shift was 'a true moral-conceptual revolution because it was a change at the deepest levels of morality: an expanded understanding of the kinds of beings that have moral standing'. Fundamentality also plays a crucial role in Walden's (2015) account of individual moral revolutions. He suggests that changes in our beliefs about a subject are revolutionary when they are due to a 'change in background framework that conditions our thinking about that subject' (Walden 2015: 283) With the idea that moral revolutions involve radical or fundamental change often comes a point about moral incommensurability, in the sense that the moral aspects changed by the revolution are incomprehensible, unjustifiable or incompatible with the pre-revolutionary situation.…”

“…8 This may be similar to what Baker calls a moral reform. When Walden (2015) distinguishes between moral change by accretion and (revolutionary) moral change by reconfiguration, he suggests that the difference between moral revolutions and other types of change is gradual rather than categorical, with the 'pervasiveness' and fundamentality of the change determining whether it comes off as (more or less of) a revolution. Pleasants (2018) suggests that moral change within a paradigm is non-revolutionary, as opposed to revolutionary moral change marked by inter-paradigmatic change.…”

Transformative Expression

“…1 I discuss the transformative power of beauty in Riggle (2016). For a discussion of morally transformative art, see Walden (2015).…”