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Barbarous Spectacle and General Massacre: A Defence of Gory Fictions
Author(s) -
Stoner Ian
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
journal of applied philosophy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.339
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1468-5930
pISSN - 0264-3758
DOI - 10.1111/japp.12405
Subject(s) - argument (complex analysis) , skepticism , duty , taste , aesthetics , suspect , spectacle , philosophy , psychology , epistemology , literature , social psychology , art , criminology , law , political science , medicine , theology , neuroscience
Many people suspect it is morally wrong to watch the graphically violent horror films colloquially known as gorefests . A prominent argument vindicating this suspicion is the Argument from Reactive Attitudes (ARA). The ARA holds that we have a duty to maintain a well‐functioning moral psychology, and watching gorefests violates that duty by threatening damage to our appropriate reactive attitudes. But I argue that the ARA is probably unsound. Depictions of suffering and death in other genres typically do no damage to our appropriate reactive attitudes, and until we locate a relevant difference between these depictions in gorefests and in other genres, we should assume that the depictions in gorefests do no damage. I consider and reject three candidate differences: in artistic merit, meaningfulness, and audience orientation. Until genre sceptics identify a relevant difference, we should accept the taste for gory fictions as we would any other morally innocuous variation in taste.