Breaking News: Aesthetic Utilitarianism is a Sure Loser

The principle of utilitarianism is usually phrased like this: when facing a moral decision, the right action is the action which produces (or can be justifiably believed likely to produce) the maximal ratio of happiness to unhappiness for the maximum number of people, or for all members of the moral community. Since the days of Bentham and J. S. Mill, utilitarianism has made a substantial retrenchment, recasting its central principle in terms of types of actions instead of particular ones. This retreat from act to rule utilitarianism came about largely because of the obvious and insurmountable practical difficulty of rehearsing the same infinitely complicated value-weighing calculations every time one faces a morally significant decision, and from the simpler fact that no one ever really did this except to demonstrate the theory. Though it is applied somewhat differently, the principle itself—the greatest good for the greatest number—is unchanged.

I have never heard anyone call himself an “aesthetic utilitarian,” as impressive as it sounds, but views of art pretty much along these lines are not terribly uncommon. Rather, they are both terrible and common. I have found them in at least two places.

Mass appeal

Among Christians as much as anywhere, I find the general feeling that the value of a painting or a work for the theater or whatever it is, is in proportion to its appeal, to the work’s mass appeal; we praise a work to the extent that the greater number of people who view it, read it, or hear it are “moved.”

I don’t want to pick on anyone here, so we’ll have to stick to the abstract. But everyone knows that, for example, an all-Christian theater company probably produces lousy theater, and I’m guessing that many such organizations (Christian ones) would be ok with that assessment. This is because they aren’t concerned with whether the audience leaves the theater impressed with the finer points of artistry and execution, and they especially do not care how in the mind of the most savvy audience member they measure up to competing figures and institutions in their genre. Mediocrity is a matter of methodology, since they’re interested in the many, not the fine, sophisticated few. For these guys, in a whole new way, the devil’s in the details.

Nudity in the visual arts

The question of nudity in the visual arts raises these issues explicitly. As no doubt the reader is aware, it is often argued that a Christian ethic cannot endorse representations of the naked human figure in the visual arts, or even overly suggestive images, much less actual nudity or sexually charged acts in a performance piece or on stage. I have yet to hear a compelling exegetical defense of this position; the argument from Ham’s humiliation of Noah in Genesis 9 is shamefully creative, and it seems to me more likely that the language of “looking upon another’s nakedness” is a euphemism for an illicit sexual act, specifically in this case homosexual incest. But just in general, this position makes two mistakes: it expands the distribution of “pornography” with reckless imprudence, and at the same time it rejects the role of conscience in the realm of Christian liberty.

So the more common and I think the more substantive reasoning is this, a Pauline brotherly love argument: supposing the consciences of the artistic few are untroubled by the representations in question, Paul commends nonetheless a loving enjoyment of Christian freedom, lest we trouble our brother’s conscience or lead him into sin (Rom. 14; 1 Cor. 8). And so the argument goes: what about the weaker brother? And I think it is a good argument, accept for this single fact: art is not for everyone.

Art is not for everyone

In an interview published in It was God: Making Art to the Glory of God, Edward Knippers said it well:

We must remember that art is not for everyone. If a weaker brother has a personal problem with the erotic aspect of nudity that leads him astray, then he should work out his own salvation with fear and trembling which might mean that he will not look at paintings with nudes. As for the offense of a difficulty with the visual language, I see no reason to dumb down the art that the Lord has called us to make so that everyone will be able to understand it. The viewers have a responsibility. If they are interested they should learn something about the language of art (78).

Finally, some argue that only “excessive” — by which they mean aesthetically unwarranted — nude or suggestive content crosses a Christian ethic. I find this position most appealing, since, by affirming a measure of integrity as regards the aesthetic realm, it resists the downward pull of the greatest common denominator and preserves art as art.

The other example of the tyranny of the aesthetically dim is communist art. The standard rhetoric of communist oversight committees, the committee on music or on literature or whatever, is that art is and ought to be “for the people,” or must “serve the good of the people,” and the most scathing aesthetic condemnations issuing from these tyrannical coteries of back-stabbers is that this or that work is “subversive” or “elitist” (these are considered synonymous), of no use in other words to the body politic, to the people, to the state. But we all know that the best “communist” art is anti-communist art, and that the stuff which the state commissions is invariably dull and stupid. Of course it is: it’s for everybody.

Enslaved to the least artistic mind

A perennial criticism of utilitarianism is the claim that the principle of utility, if carried out consistently, would require every person to give away his goods and resources until he reduced himself to the lowest common denominator. (If this doesn’t seem disagreeable—and to many it doesn’t—then it isn’t much of a criticism.) In other words, in order to avoid all out hedonism and licentiousness where there are no restraints on the means to a given end, utilitarianism will say that the morally right action is the one that produces the greatest amount of happiness without inflicting a comparable moral evil. So for example, it would be wrong to save ten thousand people from starvation by killing them or by killing another ten thousand people and redistributing their resources. On a personal level, even if I can do nothing directly to help the destitute, I would be required to surrender my possessions and comforts until I approach the point of causing more harm than good.

Applied aesthetically, that means that your art is always enslaved to the least artistic mind. It also means that the success of art has to be measured empirically: somebody has to cry or have an ecstatic experience, somebody has to be comforted, somebody has to take to the streets and march for something, or “feel” this way or that. You can watch any of those communist propaganda films and see for yourself: everyone is smiling. Every shot of someone looking downtrodden—if anyone dared—was cut from the film, believe me, because what matters most is the dull but useful, the cash-value of the film: people feeling good. And the preponderance of “Christian” art offers the same cheap cheer.

Aesthetic maturity

Of course, I don’t want to argue that the less impact a work has the better it is. But I want to argue, or point out, that the greatest whatever for the greatest whoever is a principle which is most certainly destructive of art. Since it is a natural effect of refinement, exclusivity is more often a symptom of aesthetic maturity. (That is not to say that abstrusity is a short cut to profundity.) I think most people who are involved in any artistic pursuit would readily agree; no artist who takes his art seriously values the instant sentiment of the uninformed as much as the considered critique of the expert.

To treat mass appeal as an aesthetic goal is to turn art into social work or demagoguery, and forcing a message onto the medium—artificially, in this way, bluntly—devalues the medium and demeans the audience: If you want to tell me something, just tell me. I think in the moment you determine your end or goal in stark independence from the creative process and the medium, particularly when that end includes mass appeal, your aesthetic demise is sealed. If the goal is common appeal, the result will be common art. We who seek to serve and honor the creator God, the giver of all that is good, in either producing or appreciating artistic work, ought to do better. We ought to do our best.

Nathan D. Shannon is a Ph.D. candidate at the Free University of Amsterdam and a lecturer in systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary.