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Introduction
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- About
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About the lecture
In this module, we introduce the question that sits at the centre of this course: what is the relationship between art and ethics? Can art that is in the service of evil ever be considered ‘great’ art? In order to think about the problem in more depth, we take as an example Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 film, ‘Triumph of the Will’, routinely praised as one of the best documentaries ever made—but also a piece of Nazi propaganda.
About the lecturer
Sacha Golob read Philosophy as an undergraduate at Pembroke College, Cambridge before completing the BPhil in Philosophy at Merton College, Oxford. He returned to Cambridge to do his PhD on the relationship between Kant and Phenomenology.
From 2009 to 2012 he was an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a Junior Research Fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge.
Hi. My name is Sasha Gulab. I'm a lecturer in philosophy at King's College, London.
00:00:02This is a series of short introductory lectures on the relationship between art
00:00:07and ethics.
00:00:11So I want you to imagine a case.
00:00:13Okay, imagine a film from which is praised for its originality,
00:00:14which was praised for its beauty, which is exciting, which grabs the audience,
00:00:17which uses the camera in new ways, which brings new people to the cinema.
00:00:21Okay, there's a film from an artistic perspective.
00:00:25Seems incredible, seems a landmark.
00:00:28The content of this film, however,
00:00:32is Nazi propaganda.
00:00:34So on the one hand you have
00:00:36the artistic achievement, the originality, the passion,
00:00:38the
00:00:40fierce engagement with the audience. On the other hand over the message of this film
00:00:42is a message of hatred
00:00:46and a message of bigotry.
00:00:48The question of interesting today is what we should think about.
00:00:50Art works like this.
00:00:52This is an important question because, of course,
00:00:54you don't have to imagine this case.
00:00:56This is a real case.
00:00:57So the image you can see up on the screen now is a still from
00:00:59a film by Leni Riefenstahl called The Triumph of the Will.
00:01:02This is an incredibly famous film,
00:01:05is a film that has all the virtues that I talked about,
00:01:07the groundbreaking camera work, the incredible excitement,
00:01:10the ability to bring the audience into it.
00:01:13But it's a film whose purpose
00:01:15is to convey the message of the Nazis to convince waverers in the population
00:01:18of
00:01:24the power and the inevitability of fascism.
00:01:25So what you have in this work is a difficult case where, on the one hand,
00:01:28you seem to have artistic achievement.
00:01:32On the other hand, you seem to have a great moral problem.
00:01:34So the topic we're gonna talk about over these
00:01:37lectures is what's the relationship between art and morality?
00:01:39In particular,
00:01:44the question of interesting that started
00:01:45is an immoral work of art, a bad work of art.
00:01:46If you have a work of art like Riefenstahl,
00:01:50does that make it a bad work of art?
00:01:52Does the immorality of it damage it
00:01:54as a film as a piece of art?
00:01:58Now I've used the example of Reef and start here,
00:02:01but of course you can see this is a very, very general problem.
00:02:03Okay, lots and lots of books of films, video games,
00:02:06pieces of music, even think of explicit lyrics
00:02:10are going to have content that you might
00:02:14think is morally questionable or morally problematic.
00:02:16And the issue is there going to be to work out how that impacts on it
00:02:19as
00:02:23an artwork. Okay.
00:02:25Could it be, for example,
00:02:26that you had a work of genius that was trying
00:02:27to put across a message that was deeply immoral?
00:02:30How do these two
00:02:33sets of values, the artistic and the moral, relate together
00:02:35and interact?
00:02:39Now I want to begin by setting aside a topic that I'm not going to talk about,
00:02:41but that is connected to these things.
00:02:46And that's the question of behavioural or cause of influence.
00:02:48So one question is, if you had an immoral work of art, whether it might lead
00:02:51the audience to do immoral things,
00:02:56Okay, so, for example,
00:02:59we all seen kind of moral panics about whether particular video
00:03:00games in particular films might lead to people doing evil things.
00:03:03I'm not going to talk about this question of causal influence.
00:03:06Whether immoral works make people do immoral things.
00:03:09There's lots of reasons why I'm not gonna talk about it, partly because
00:03:12it just seems a factual question whether
00:03:15data is very, very conflicted,
00:03:19and you can see why it's conflicted. If you think
00:03:21at a conceptual level,
00:03:23it's not clear
00:03:24for violent person watches, violent films.
00:03:26Did they seek out those films because they were already violent,
00:03:28or did they become violent through watching those films?
00:03:31So the issue of causal influence on behaviour
00:03:34is very unclear,
00:03:37and that's not what I'm going to be concerned with.
00:03:38What I'm concerned with, Rather, is a case like this.
00:03:40I suppose we all go to the cinema and we see a film
00:03:44and we come away and think
00:03:46whilst I like some parts of it,
00:03:49I think it was very racist. The message of it was
00:03:51a deeply problematic one.
00:03:54Now, maybe in this case, none of us are going to become Racists.
00:03:56It may be that our behaviour is not going to in
00:04:00any way by this film,
00:04:01But the question
00:04:03still stands that even if it's not going to influence influence us,
00:04:04does the fact that it had this racist message make it a bad film?
00:04:07Okay,
00:04:12so the topic we're concerned with
00:04:13is setting aside issues about behavioural influence
00:04:14and setting aside issues about what exactly these works might make people do,
00:04:17we're going to ask,
00:04:23even if they didn't lead to evil acts is the
00:04:24fact that they have an immoral message and artistic problem.
00:04:27That's gonna be the topic of these talks.
00:04:31
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Golob, S. (2018, August 15). IB DP Philosophy - Introduction [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/options/ib-dp-philosophy?auth=0&lesson=932&option=3569&type=lesson
MLA style
Golob, S. "IB DP Philosophy – Introduction." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/options/ib-dp-philosophy?auth=0&lesson=932&option=3569&type=lesson