Genre and Folk Evaluations of Art

How do our moral evaluations of artworks relate to our aesthetic evaluations? Put it another way: do moral defects cause or constitute aesthetic defects, cause or constitute aesthetic virtues, or are they aesthetically irrelevant? This is the question that we (Shen-yi Liao and Jonathan Phillips) attempted to answer in recent studies. Our findings suggest that there is no univocal answer to the question. Instead, the influence that moral evaluations have on aesthetic evaluations of artworks partly depends on genre.

Let's run through one study (N = 50; between-participants). In one condition, participants listened to a 30-second clip of a Taiwanese folk ballad song.

(Please enable flash to listen to the clip.)

Then they were shown two sets of "translated lyrics", and asked which set of lyrics would make the song more appealing.

"Show You the Facts" (Moral)
Men say stupid things like
“Women are not worth anything
I use them and then I toss them”
They don’t treat women like they should
Let me show you the facts, get it right:
Women are equals in every respect

"Game Over" (Immoral)
Another woman dropped down
I wanted it, I got it, and I’m gone
There’s another one around the corner
I’ll do the same thing with her
You know they want more from me
But the game’s over when I score

In the other condition, participants listened to a 30-second clip of a Taiwanese hip hop song.

Then they were shown the same two sets of "translated lyrics" as before, and asked which set of lyrics would make the song more appealing.

We found that participants in the folk ballad and hip hop conditions produced different patterns of response (chi-square = 4.393; p = 0.036). In the hip hop condition, a significantly greater percentage of participants judged that the immoral lyrics would make the song better.

We believe that our result adds new evidence to the ethical criticisms of art debate in philosophical aesthetics. This debate is concerned with the relationship between moral and aesthetic values of artworks. There are three prominent families of views in this debate. Autonomists think that moral defects are aesthetically irrelevant; moral value is not intrinsically related to aesthetic value. Moralists think that moral defects are aesthetic defects, at least in many cases. To be precise, they think that moral value monotonically relates to aesthetic value: as moral value decreases, aesthetic value decreases or stays the same. Immoralists agree with moralists---and disagree with autonomists---that moral value interacts with aesthetic value, but they think that some moral defects cause or constitute aesthetic virtues. To be precise, they think that moral value non-monotonically relates to aesthetic value.

Our result clearly shows that ordinary people do implicitly take moral evaluations to be relevant for aesthetic evaluations (contrary to what they may profess). The autonomists thus have the challenge of explaining away ordinary people's moral and aesthetic evaluations; that is, they must explain why ordinary people take moral defects to be aesthetic defects. More broadly, they have the burden of explaining why ordinary people's moral and aesthetic evaluations systematically fail to track the actual moral and aesthetic values. For the moralists, the challenge is to account for the different patterns of responses in the two conditions. They must explain why a significantly larger number of participants judged that the immoral lyrics to be aesthetically better in the hip hop condition, and why those participants are mistaken. Given these challenges for the autonomists and the moralists, we take our result to provide prima facie support for immoralism. As we see it, the folk are genre-sensitive immoralists when they evaluate artworks.

We would love to hear your thoughts on this study and suggestions for future studies!

[Cross-posted at Go Grue!]

Comments

[Adam Arico]

Hey Sam (and Jonathan),
Very nice, very clever, and very interesting study. I don't know much about this debate, so my questions aren't especially substantive.
First, I'm curious about why you formulated the question in terms of what would make the song more appealing. I worry that 'appeal' might not be entirely a function of aesthetic value; it might, for instance, include certain expectations about non-moral, non-aesthetic norms amongst consumers of certain genres. Maybe you could say more about why you chose that wording over something more explicitly aesthetic (e.g., 'sound better').
Relatedly, the question (as you have it in this post) seems to leave open whether it's a question about making the song more appealing _to the participant_ or more appealing _to a more general audience_. Again, this makes me wonder whether you're getting at individuals' aesthetic preferences or at their "folk sociological" judgments (about what consumers would prefer to hear).
It seems pretty plausible to me that there are norms about the content of hip-hop music, and that these norms aren't necessarily aesthetic. Certainly there's a popular stereotype of hip-hop culture with which your "Game Over" lyrics are more consistent than your "Show You the Facts" lyrics; this stereotype, I suspect, does not apply equally to the folk ballad culture. Did you guys do anything to control for the possibility that people's responses were about the non-aesthetic norms of the expected audiences?

[Shen-yi Liao]

Hey Adam,

Thanks for the comments. As I understand it, here are the two worries:
1. "More appealing" in our probe is not as obviously aesthetic as other alternative, such as "sounds better".
2. If people are only trying to "match" the lyrics and the music, then their judgments are not indicative of the aesthetic value of the work.

These are legitimate concerns, and I'm really glad you brought them up! I have some theory-heavy replies for now, but further studies investigating these concerns are definitely warranted.

Re: 1.
I worry that "sounds better" will bring up a notion that is more subjective than what is required for our philosophical conclusions. In contrast, "appealing" seems to me less subjective, more normative, and closer to what philosophers mean by "aesthetically good".

Without presupposing robust realism, I think we can still distinguish calling something aesthetically good from just saying that we like something. Think of guilty pleasures. I like Taylor Swift's song "Sixteen"---it just sounds good to me---but I don't think it is aesthetically good. So, my worry is actually the opposite of yours: that "sounds better" would only track the kind of subjective liking that lacks the normativity of aesthetic evaluations.

That said, I am still inclined to try "sounds better" to see how the results turn out. Other possibilities include "aesthetically better" or "artistically better", but I worry that some people won't understand the former and will inappropriately bring in a notion of high art or fine art into the latter. Do you have suggestions for other ways to phrase the probe?

Re: 2.
It might be that people are using their folk sociological judgments, but I think this would be okay if we think that the features that are normal for a genre tend also to be aesthetically good. It would be somewhat strange if some feature is normal for a certain genre but is not considered aesthetically good in the context of that genre. Why would the feature be normal then? At the very least, I think normal features serve as a defeasible guide to what is aesthetically good in the context of the genre. (Of course, I am not saying that atypical works are never aesthetically good.)

Suppose what I've said about normality and aesthetic value is on the right track. Then even if the folk are using sociological judgments, what they are really doing is deferring to the experts---the people who are familiar with the genre and in a better position to say what is aesthetically good. On this picture, folk sociological judgments would still track the aesthetic value of the work.

[jonathan weinberg]

Neat study! I think that Adam's concern about your probe is best met by just doing repeat versions with some different probes, and (hopefully) they'll basically line up with each other.

I have a different worry, regarding this part of your analysis: "Our result clearly shows that ordinary people do implicitly take moral evaluations to be relevant for aesthetic evaluations." But there is a gap between the moral content of the _lyrics_ and the moral content of the _song_. One might think that a song with the "immoral" lyrics is meant to be representing a particular attitude that is present in society without thereby endorsing that attitude. Or it also might be that one takes some aspects of some genres as simply being without moral content one way or the other, even though they pertain to things that do have moral valence in the real world and in other artworks; consider the over-the-top violence in many classic cartoons, for example.

Another worry about your interpretation of your results is that the moral/immoral difference is hardly the only difference between your two stimuli. The "moral" one is tediously preachy to my ear, for example, whereas the "immoral" one has a bit of narrative to it, and is more engaging. So you definitely would need to do more work before you can claim any evidence here for the aesthetics result y'all want to argue for. Honestly, I think the more interesting aspect of your results here (which are interesting!) is about the genre-sensitivity of evaluation, more than anything about moralism/immoralism.

P.S. Not to reveal too much about everyone's guilty pleasures here, but I do believe that the song by Ms. Swift in question is "Fifteen".

[Shen-yi Liao]

Hi Jonathan,

Thanks for the thoughts! Let me take them in reverse order.

You're totally right about the name of the Taylor Swift song. I am now doubly-ashamed.

You're also right that we employ a relatively simplistic conception of moral defect, on which anything that people intuitively find morally bad counts as a moral defect. I should say, however, that this relatively simplistic conception is often employed by philosophers in this debate, especially the early stages. So our results still address their views. James Harold has a great recent article, "Immoralism and the Valence Constraint" (2008 BJA) that documents and criticizes past uses of the relatively simplistic conception, and advocates for a more sophisticated conception.

On his more sophisticated conception, which seems to be what you have in mind too, a work is morally virtuous if it allows for rich, complex responses --- if it makes us think about morality in a deep way. On the flip side, a work is morally defective if it only allows for impoverished, simple responses. So, on this conception, all preachy lyrics, regardless of their content, would count as morally defective. Our results don't speak to this more sophisticated conception, but I think it's a fantastic idea for us to look at it next.

Finally, I think your first comment brings up a lot of interesting concerns. I think the best way for us to address the worry is to ask more questions to get at people's aesthetic and moral judgments of the song. Still, it's a very intriguing idea that some lyrics can express AND endorse an immoral perspective in one genre (say, folk ballad) but only express and not endorse an immoral perspective in another genre (say, hip hop). That might be a way for the moralist to account for genre-sensitivity while preserving their central claim. I'll have to think about this one more!

[Wesley Buckwalter]

@Jonathan W, I agree that the moral/immoral manipulation includes a ton of differences between vignettes (which importantly themselves are not ruled out as being aesthetic). But if what you say is right, shouldn't either it be the case that (i) preachiness bias makes people pick moral much less than they did, or (ii) despite the sig difference between cases its still true that the majority of people totally want more peachy hip-hop! (...or was your thought here that preachines bias might be interacting with genre in some non-moral way and that is responsible for any difference?)

One of the suggestions in the room when Sam presented these cool results at MERG in new york last weekend was that perhaps in future studies, people's explicit judgments about the specifics of the moral content (including questions distinguishing between lyrical vs song content for instance) could be somehow collected and then used as a predictor (in a model with a bunch of other stuff like age, genre expertise, preferences, typicality) for their aesthetic ones. Would that help at all?