Ethical Presuppositions in Narrative Art

Ethical Criticism is the practice of pointing towards a flaw in the ethical content or character of an artwork as a reason why this artwork is aesthetically faulty in some respect. This paper develops a novel account of the mechanism by which this critical practice works. In contrast to the standard approach, this does not involve positing an interaction between the intrinsic ethical value and aesthetic value of an artwork. The argument runs as follows. Narrative artworks are sometimes criticizable on the grounds that they make inaccurate presuppositions about the actual facts. There are ethical facts, at least in a minimal sense. Therefore, artworks are sometimes criticizable on the grounds that they make mistaken presuppositions about the ethical facts. I argue that this Factual Criticism approach gives a satisfactory diagnosis of the examples that initially motivate the philosophical debate about ethics and aesthetics.