ryanhooper, I think the distinction is between a process that would draw a correct conclusion and one that would not except by chance.
You do raise an interesting point about intuition. I have not studied particularly much logic or psychology, but I have often wondered about our innate ability to discover logical principles. Is it related to language? Is it inherited or acquired (or a combination of the two)? And so on. I am not sure if it is the same thing as our so-called gut reactions. It may be. But since we don’t seem to know how either one works (as far as I know), it is probably all conjecture.
When I was a child, (probably 10), my aunties gave me a gift of some soaps. They were really pretty soaps (made by Avon), and were in the shape of kittens in mittens. Adorable little soaps.
I had them in my area of the room that I shared with my sisters. One day, my older sister grabbed the soaps and told me that since the family was out of soap, we should use mine. We were poor, she told me. We couldn’t afford to hoard perfectly good soap, especially when we needed to use it. I was never going to use the soap, after all. It was just sitting there.
I cried and cried for her to give me back my kitten in a mitten soaps, but she kept on hammering away with her very “logical” reasons why I was selfish to hang onto the soaps.
My dad came by and found out what all the stir was about. He quietly decreed, “Give her back her soaps.” My sister was pissed. It made no sense. It was illogical. It was wasteful. I was never going to use them! What a waste of money! I just wanted to keep them around because (get this) I liked them. And because (this is really unreasonable) my favorite aunties gave them to me and I loved my aunties!! Crazy, foolishly sentimental and illogical, huh?
My sister was being very logical. There really was no logical reason to not use the soap, especially since we could have used some soap in the bathroom, and we weren’t rolling in dough. I didn’t have to keep those soaps. I never did use them. For all I know, they’re still stuck in a box somewhere, unused.
My sister felt no emotional attachment to the soaps and did not value the soaps, so it made no sense to her that I would feel any emotion for them. So, since she didn’t feel anything for them, saw no special value in them, it made no sense that I should be allowed to either, did it?
One problem with the “logical” approach to things is that “logic” varies from one person to the next. No matter how much you try to distill it, logic is still subjective. You can get into entire debates about the logic of viewpoint A versus the logic of viewpoint B. Logic is not an equation that balances out equally - it is a way of thinking.
For instance, regarding the second example. The painting is the artist’s. The reviewer should have no attatchment to the painting one way or the other, and should thus have no objection to not reveiwing it, since it is, after all, the artist’s work.
In fact, from a certain logical point of view, the entire case is moot, because there is no logical reason to produce art, much less critique it. It is, logically, a waste of time and, potentially, money.
In conclusion, don’t make me bitchslap you with Turgenev.
I changed the artist’s requests to make them something that clearly need to be justified. If the artist is only asking for the law to be enforced, that isn’t really a request worth debating.
If you’d prefer something more realistic, ignore the part about publishing reviews. The artist’s claim still boils down to, “You don’t understand what it feels like to be an artist. If I give you this painting, you have to let me decide who you’ll show it to, because I feel like I deserve that right. You’d ask for the same thing if you were in my shoes, so you have to give it to me.” Is it really not possible for someone who isn’t an artist to counter that? Must he come to the conclusion that the artist deserves that right, based on nothing but the artist’s own feelings?
It seems to me that we have a false dichotomy. The OP allows only for arguments based on emotions alone or logic alone. But humans do not work that way, not even in a court of law. I have been on a jury, and we were always trying to read between the lines, trying to figure out things from what was not said, reading emotions, and relying in part on the way our emotions reacted to the emotions of the litigants.
The OP seems pretty passionate about his/her thesis. He/she has not proven it using pure logic. Didn’t we live through this with logical positivism? Does the name Wittgenstein ring a bell?
Well, to get a more true picture of what the original debate stemmed from, let’s have the artist say, “If I let you in my house and allow you to see my paintings, I want you to respect my privacy and not make copies of my paintings and show them to everyone else. If I wanted my paintings to be shown by the public at large, I’d do it myself. I feel like I shouldn’t have to justify or explain why I feel that my paintings are my private business, I just ask that my feelings about my own private works be respected.”
“Giving” implies that the other person has something that belongs to them and not the artist. But when an artist creates something, most people concede that it is theirs, and does not belong to some third party who had no part in its creation, but merely wants to use or exploit it (for their own illogical reasons).
How about, “I did this portrait of my dad two days after he died. I don’t even know how I managed to do it under the circumstances, but I did it for his memorial service booklet. I have many emotions and memories tied to this drawing and I would not want to see you use it for [insert supposedly objectionable use here]. This drawing cannot possibly mean as much to you as it does to me and you apparently wouldn’t understand that unless you did a portrait of your dad under similar circumstances.”
Yes, as a matter of fact I presented that scenario to Mr2001 in a previous discussion. He would not accept it. He didn’t want to hear about any emotions. Bah! Emotions! Who cares how the artist feels!?! Meaningless!
He wanted a logical reason—no emotions, please—why someone shouldn’t be able to use an artist’s dead dad’s memorial service cover art for whatever reason.
(And yes, as it happens, I did do a portrait of my dad two days after he died, and yes, it was used in his memorial service. And no, I don’t think I have to give a “logical” reason as to why I don’t want someone else to do whatever—anything—to it." How terribly illogical of me!)
Well, that was a much earlier thread than the one that led to this, but what the hell.
That last part is key: “I just ask that my feelings about my own private works be respected.” It’s not just a polite request; some people (including you, IIRC) have said there’s an ethical obligation to respect the artist’s feelings. That is what I’m trying to figure out - when and why respecting his feelings changes from something polite to something mandatory.
What’s being given is the power to dictate who can use the work and how. Normally, when you hold something in your hands, you can choose to put it in a copy machine, or take a picture of it and put that on a magazine cover, etc. The artist is asking people to give up that choice.
You wouldn’t happen to have a quote of me asking that question, by any chance, would you? I mean, surely you would never conflate two different issues and misrepresent my words.
Ethical obligation? Yes. To respect what someone has in their own house? The stuff that they request remain private and not made public? Yes. Why is this so difficult to grasp?
The artist is saying, “If you want to do [these objectionable things to my work], just don’t use it and leave me alone.”
You don’t have some God-given right to use someone else’s stuff in any manner you see fit, particularly stuff that is in their own home, just because you happened to cast your eyes upon it.
Can’t find the quote. There are so many of these threads that we’ve participated in, and it’s possible I got some of your disdainful “emotions” comments mixed up. There have been so many, after all. If that is the case (which I am not sure that it is), I apologize. I’ll keep looking though—but it’s kind of like finding a needle in a haystack.
But while we’re on the subject, can you tell me why someone shouldn’t publish my dad’s funeral artwork? Since you feel that anything that someone sees on display on someone else’s house is “open season,” and could be shared, why not with my dad’s portrait? You say in your OP that we all should have a logical reason: so, tell me. What would my logical reason be for not allowing others to use my dad’s portrait? And if you cannot find any logical reason, then am I to assume that it’s okay for someone to use my dad’s picture? Right?
Not just that - you claim, IIRC, that there’s also an ethical obligation to respect the artist’s wishes about who can use his work, copy it, and so on, whether it was published or not. That’s what I was getting at in the OP. Please explain why we are ethically obligated to respect those feelings before changing the subject back to something we talked about seven months ago.
Why shouldn’t an artist feel that others are ethically obligated to NOT copy or publish their unpublished works? Works that are found in their own private residence? If they wanted ithe work to be published or copied or whatever, then they’d have done it themselves. Why shouldn’t others respect their wishes for these things to remain private (i.e. not published)?
I realize that this line of reasoning is all emotional (i.e. the emotional need for privacy to be respected), but sorry. I think that’s basically it. :shrug:
It is apparent that you don’t believe that artists should have the right to expect that the unpublished works in their own house would remain unpublished or uncopied or whatever. This is old news.
It’s the artist’s property, so the artist may do as he/she damn well pleases with it. If the artist allows you to view the work and clearly expresses beforehand the condition that you do not attempt to duplicate or take a picture of it, you effectively make a promise by accepting the conditions. Breaking a promise usually goes against most conventional moral codes.
Excellent explanation. And to go a bit further, conventional moral codes tell us to not (for instance) shit on the carpet in someone’s living room. We needn’t be asked beforehand to not shit on someone’s carpet, it’s kind of understood. Similarly, it’s an understood moral code (by 99.9999% of people, I should say), that you don’t photograph and copy someone else’s private creative works in their own house—not without getting permission first.
Due respect, that’s an equivocation, which is of course a logical fallacy. What is logically correct and what is ethically correct are not necessarily the same. In fact, formulation of a deontic logic has been notoriously elusive, and that’s why.
There is a perfectly logical reason to produce art: for the enjoyment of others and oneself.
What is the logical reason for enjoyment of others and oneself? Well, you have to acknowledge that humans are imperfect. Even if we tried, most of us cannot function at %100, all the time. In fact, after a certain point, whatever objective measurements we could make of our efficiency would probably start to decline both as a relative (definitely) and an absolute measurement of productivity, since we would be so stressed out.
Art is part of this relaxation/recreation process. Q.E.D.
In the few cases where there is a promise, yes, that’s a fine explanation. But what about where there is none, where the artist shows his work first and demands control later? Do the artist’s own feelings about his work justify giving him that control?
Hmm. Would you say that an appropriate answer to “Why is that unethical?” is “Because I really feel like it is”? And, to get back to a point in the OP that hasn’t really been addressed: Is someone with strong feelings on a subject a better judge of the ethics of that subject?
Does one have to promise not to shit on someone else’s carpet for it to be a moral expectation on the part of the carpet owner?
But let’s explore the scenario (which is what brought this whole thing up in the first place), where there is not an equity between the two parties.
One one hand, you’ve got someone who worked at something, created this thing, owns the physical object of this thing. It’s all a product of their doing. Their finances, their time, and it’s physically owned by them, and in their residence.
On the other hand, you’ve got someone who didn’t work at the thing, never created it, never put any time, effort or finances into its creation, probably doesn’t even have the remotest notion of how it was created and very likely could not duplicate a similar item themselves. And, they also do not own the creation, nor is this creation in their residence.
And yet, somehow their input on the uses of thing that they don’t own, isn’t in their residence, is in no way a product of any effort on their part, is equally valid to the one who owns it and created it (and it’s in their private residence)?
