Virtue Ethics, Feminism, and Relativism

Anti-feminist writer Janice Fiamengo recently published an article on Substack that discusses the relationship between support for Lindsay Clancy and what Fiamengo refers to as "feminine ethics," which she argues "prioritizes prevention of harm over punishment for wrongdoing." This is in contrast to principles like personal responsibility and absolute prohibitions, which Fiamengo associates with masculine ethics.

I've only skimmed the article, but the first thing that caught my attention was the mentioning of feminist philosopher Carol Gilligan, whose ideas embody feminine ethics (more technically referred to as "the ethics of care" or "care ethics"). In a previous post, I gave virtue ethics a hard time, criticizing its account of causation as well as its adjacency to moral relativism. One of the sources I drew from in that post was Moral Theory: An Introduction by Mark Timmons, who notes that Gilligan was central to the development of care ethics, and that this ethical theory is a version of virtue ethics.[1]

It appears there might be some substance to my worry that virtue ethics gives way to moral relativism after all. Here's what Fiamengo has to say after quoting Gilligan: "Gilligan was here describing a far more subjective and relativistic, ever-shifting and flexible, approach to moral judgement than the rules-based approach developed and refined by the men who crafted western law."

Notes

1. Mark Timmons, Moral Theory: An Introduction, pp. 224–225.

What Is the Quality of Art Based On?

Walking into an art gallery can be a confusing experience. I think Thomas Sowell helps explain the cause of this confusion when he writes: 

Unlike great cultural achievements of the past, such as magnificent cathedrals, which were intended to inspire kings and peasants alike, the hallmark of self-consciously "modern" art and music is its inaccessibility to the masses and often even its deliberate offensiveness to, or mockery of, the masses.[1]

As I read this, Marcel Duchamp's Fountain and Piero Manzoni's Artist's Shit immediately come to mind. I would also add that "inaccessibility to the masses" applies just as well to contemporary art. I recall an acquaintance telling me about an exhibition where the artist sat in a chair while a bunch of children ran around the room. Apparently the children running around was the art. It's difficult not to simply laugh at the thought of this, but if I were to be charitable, maybe the purpose of the exhibit was to locate the artistic within the ordinary. I understand the attraction of adjusting one's way of seeing the world in order to make it more interesting, but showcases such as this are overly theoretical and perhaps even elitist.

Having said all that, I wouldn't be so quick to pit modern (not to mention contemporary) art against that of the Middle Ages. I don't mean to dismiss the grandeur of Europe's Gothic cathedrals. (I wouldn't mind seeing some of them in person someday, after all!) And of course, they're much more impressive than the previously mentioned works by Duchamp and Manzoni. But not all modern art is so lacking in quality.

As Francis Schaeffer points out, being more attached to the past than we have to be is to our detriment:

There is no living language which does not undergo constant change. The languages which do not change, Latin, for example, are dead. As long as one has a living art, its forms will change. The past art forms, therefore, are not necessarily the right ones for today or tomorrow. To demand the art forms of yesterday in either word systems or art is a bourgeois failure.[2]

Consider these modern works in the collage to the right: In Blue by Wassily Kandinsky, Errand Boy by Paul Klee, The Frog by Rufino Tamayo, and The Pirate by Giorgio de Chirico. These are good paintings. They're imaginative, not needlessly offensive, and they're also interesting in terms of the colours and shapes used.

So what does the quality of art ultimately rely on if realism has been ruled out? Some people like to say that modern and contemporary art isn't beautiful, and that's what makes it bad. Is good art necessarily beautiful? I don't think so. Francisco Goya's The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters is frightening (without being distasteful, I might add), yet it's still a technically impressive print that communicates an important message.

I think that the quality of art ultimately depends on its being interesting to look at. Perhaps the reader will roll their eyes at me for such a practical and unsophisticated answer, but it is the visual arts we have been focusing on in this article, after all. If I were to guess the main cause of failure within modern and contemporary art, my hunch would be that it is so theoretical and activistic to the point where there is hardly anything interesting to see.

Notes

[1] Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p. 546.

[2] Francis A. Schaeffer, Art and the Bible, p. 73.

Praise and Blame

If we cannot blame those who do terrible things, then we should not praise those who do excellent things either.

Defining "Woke"

What makes something or somebody "woke"?

While ideas and people belonging to the left are much more likely to be labelled "woke" than those on the right, I don't suspect it's as simple as saying that "woke" is a synonym for "left-wing politics." Chris Hedges, who is not particularly friendly to the right, interviewed Christian Parenti on his article “The Cargo Cult of Woke.” Based on a brief skim of Hedges' interview, both him and Parenti seem very left-wing and also very uninterested in wokeness.

So if "woke" isn't just shorthand for "left-wing," then what exactly does it mean? I would put forward the following definition: For something or somebody to be "woke" is for it/them to contain the most superficial, self-congratulatory, and intolerant aspects of left-wing politics.

Western culture abounds with wokeness. Whether it's a research paper on the relationship between queerness and parkour or a rabble-rauser in a public library cursing at a senior over offensive words used in a quotation, woke ideas and behaviours are running at full speed and don't appear to be slowing down any time soon. These two examples belong to my province, Saskatchewan, by the way, which is hardly a bastion of progressivism. Most people don't even know that Saskatchewan exists (a fact that is perhaps slightly buffered by the occasional cultural phenomenon like Corner Gas).

Dream Sequence

You dream that you have gone to church. The service ends, and you walk around the parking lot looking for your car. You can't find it. You walk around again. No luck!

Then you realize that parking the car was never part of the dream. How could you have possibly found your car when you had never parked it in the first place?

It appears that even in dreams the sequence of events matter. You can't necessarily add in important details retroactively. Dreams are not just some colouring books of the imagination, where sections can be filled in any order.