Ethical criticism in fictional engagements

The predominant focus in the literature on the relationship between art and morality revolves around assessing whether an individual’s assessment of an artwork's moral flaws contributes to its aesthetic worth. However, significantly less attention has been devoted to exploring the ways in which artworks can be morally flawed. When addressed, traditional ethical criticism of art often grounds the immorality of an artwork within the artwork itself, concentrating on the attitudes or perspectives that the artworks manifest and prescribe to the audience. However, I argue that this thesis is limited in grounding ethical criticism, not only due to its lack of consideration for contextual factors but also in its assumption of a symmetrical relation within our imagination and emotional responses to fictional representations and their real-life counterparts. Such an argument does not seem to align with our intuitions that imagining and responding to immoral perspectives prompted by fictional works may be more immune to moral criticisms than our real-world immoral imagination and attitudes. For that reason, this thesis aims to justify our normative engagement with immoral fictions, specifically why audiences can respond to and imagine fiction in ways that are different in real life without this being tied to moral constraints.