The Captured Perspective

Before I add some final thoughts in the next installment, I want to clarify some terminology from my last post on beauty and ethics. This is cued in part by my lawyer friend Stacey who sent me the following Facebook:

in the latest entry, you have phrases like “the ethical life,” “the artist,” and “the legalist”… I know this may seem rather silly, but your article caused me much confusion. First, because I have a (traditional? conservative?) concept of the definition of “ethical” – meaning pursuit of what is fair/ just/ right, etc. Second, because I always thought pursuit of beauty was something different (termed “aesthetic” or “vanity” or…beauty leading to pleasure being “hedonism”). And finally, because if the terms “artist” and “legalist” mean ‘ artist’ and ‘lawyer,” I interpret your entry as presupposing that the lawyer never does anything based on emotion, but rather blindly follows laws….but I don’t want to delve into a discussion of the legal system because I’m not even sure if I’m interpreting this correctly.

Because of this criticism, I decided to defriend her on facebook. However, after stewing in it a bit more, I thought better and decided to clarify some terminology and concepts.

Let me start by staying that, at the core, I am really wondering whether our concepts of beauty (or an intuition of what is involved in living a beautiful life) might have something to say when the law fails to be normative. I wonder whether this intuition might be a reliable guide when the law is not clear about how to act, or in some cases appears to be advocating for a less beautiful (ugly?) way of being?

Let me identify three situations where these questions might become salient.

Let’s start by taking the top photo of the montage on this post– a beautiful scene of Patagonia in the South of Chile. Let’s assume for a moment that this part of Patagonia is not legally protected by the Chilean government. In addition, you come to find out there is a gigantic supply of oil which could satisfy that natural resource need for the entire world for the next 50 years. From an ethical standpoint, the question here is whether your conception of this land as ‘beuatiful’ should factor into how you see this land and whether you end up drilling?

Now, take the second photo down of a couple in love– in this case an engagement photo of my brother John and future sister-in-law Ashley. The legal system clearly has something to say about how they should behave towards each other from a contractual standpoint– the binding nature of the marriage contract and/or plans for how to deal with resource allocation in the  case of a breach. In addition, the law dictates how they should or should not treat each other just by virtue of bering human, such as is the case with laws against physical abuse. But what should they do with regards to the nuance of their relationship with each other– how they interact when they really don’t want to be around each other, what it looks like in practice to see and treat another person as fully human, or ‘little’ things like how and when they should forgive.

Finally, take a look at the third photo. Here we have a picture of a Haitian man following this year’s earthquake. What does the law say about how one should treat this man? Does he deserve medical treatment? What about if he does not have health insurance, as is the case with the majority of Haitians? From a personal standpoint, should we, in a quasi- ‘good Samaritan‘ decision moment, go out of our way to treat this man… or possibly text in money to support the cause? What if we know that no one would ever know if we walked by (or texted)… or if we know that our treatment would not be effective… would our answers differ?  In this situation — very much like the other two– there is little in the way of legal constraint to guide our behavior, yet action is still possible and choices are still made. How should our conception of beauty, and specifically the nature of a beautiful/ ethical life shape our behavior?

Thus, to answer Stacey’s question, what I am trying to get at is how we act ethically either in lieu of the law… and whether this system (whatever it is, ethical, aesthetic, religious, intuitive) ever warrant taking behavior explicitly opposed to the law? In other words, when our conceptions of ‘fair/ just/ right’ are often muddier than we would like, how should we act?

I’ll try to flesh this out a bit this weekend…

ciao

James Cameron’s Avatar has garnered a lot of attention of late, most recently with its impressive 9 academy award nominations.

Outside of these accolades, one of the more intriguing phenomenon associated with the film has been the relatively large number of individuals experiencing depression and/or suicidal thoughts following the film. In general, some people seem to be captured by the beauty of this world that ‘earth’ as we know it feels drab, and something only worthy of escape.

One viewer, Ivar Hill, wrote of this experience on a Avatar message board saying:

“When I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed … gray. It was like my whole life, everything I’ve done and worked for, lost its meaning. It just seems so … meaningless. I still don’t really see any reason to keep … doing things at all. I live in a dying world.”

We are all drawn towards the beautiful in some fashion or another. No doubt, we all pursue this beauty… whether that be in romantic relationships, in the work or life we find appealing, or even in a draw towards music that resonates with our sense of what is true. But can beauty be a way to orient the ethical life? Can one seek after beauty and call this ethical?

In other words, is the ethical life best pursued by a legalist or an artist?

Part of me hopes that the answer to my question is the artist. I tend to think that the person who does something because they think it is a beautiful way to act conveys a more appealing picture of ethics than the tactician following a set of laws. But is this just a personal pipe-dream?

To be honest, I don’t know the answer to this question, but I want to try to flesh something out in the next post. Three question that might start the discussion… chime in as you feel appropriate.

1. Does our experience of beauty make our experience of the ugly depressing and leave us with a posture of an escapist (e.g. Avatar), or might it spur us on to create beauty when it is lacking?
2. How are our senses of what is beautiful conditioned by things which might make this intuition unethical or untrustworthy (e.g. Nazi’s perceiving the beauty of a pure Arian race, and thus the ethical act becoming genocide)?
3. In what ways is the subjectivity of beauty a benefit and a drawback from the rigidness or objectivity of a ‘law’ based morality?