On the moral import of the arts: The case of music

Abstract

There has been a controversy on the moral import of music and art in general. On the one hand, the moralist view contends that there is some sort of link between art and morality, even if the way to specify this link may be highly diverse. It comprises most of the classical views of art, from Schiller's view of the role of artistic education in moral development, to any view that declares a form of art as corrupt or degenerated, or enlightening. What it is assumed minimally in all of them is that the moral import of an artwork contributes to its aesthetic value. On the other hand, formalist views claim that the aesthetic value of an artwork is genuine and autonomous, and therefore it is independent of any other value. In this chapter we focus on music, as the most difficult case for the moralist standpoint, given the lack of representational content of music. We argue for a variety of the moralist's view according to which the moral import of a musical artwork is not derived from its content (obviously, as it lack any), but from its pragmatics: the context and the intentions that guide its composition and performance, by analogy with any other intentional action, and point to the emotional impact of music as the common ground that bridges moral and aesthetic values. As a provisional conclusion, we outline a research program for brain studies that follows from this proposal, as a way test its predictions, focusing both on the emotional grounds of valuation and their context-dependency.

Keywords: Aesthetic value; Context-dependency; Moral import; Moralism; Pragmatics of music.