Morality in Arts

The "the Moral Mind" is very inspirational. It invites the argument between "being right" and "being moral".

In the second story it tells, I tend to believe that Julie and Mark should not be blamed as "immoral". There are a few reasons for me to think so. First, they were aware of what they were doing and clearly knew the possible consequence of whatever they did when they decided to have sex with each other. Therefore their dicision was mature and responsible enough. Secondly, what they did was not harmful to each other, instead, they both benifited from whatever they did. And thirdly, what they did was not directly harmful to the society. One may argue that siblings sex may produce genetic abnormality which is potentially harmful to the society. But whatever we do always has an indirect impact on the society and therefore we do not need to make a decision by considering every potential impact on the society. Otherwise, nobody is going to be able to make any decision.

However, in the first story. The murderer was absolutely wrong and immoral because what he did was harmful to those victims and obviously he made his decisions without those victims' consensus. Scientists may argue that the murderer's brain operated differently and therefore he was innocent. However, a morality judgement doesn't need to be made by a doer of an action him/herself. That the murderer doesn't think so doesn't mean that the entire morality system cannot make a judgement against his/her behavior. We always have the rights to judge a person's decisions and behaviours.

This article also reminds me of morality standards on arts. I have long been believing that art works don't need to be judged morally. In other words, there are only "good" or "bad" art works but no "moral" or "immoral" ones. This could be a debatable statement but I still would like to display a few justifications:
1, From an artist's perspective, an artist has no moral or social purposes to create his/her works (if he/she has, his/her works are not considered art works).
2, From a viewer's perspective, it doesn't matter whatever an artist uses/describes in his/her works, a viewer should only focus on "how" but not on "what" an artist creates. If a viewer judges an art work based on morality standards, he/she is not viewing an art work and this is not the author's business any more.

Of course, if an artist creates his/her works purposely to promote any moral standards, no matter the standards are good or bad, he/she is no longer considered artist, in my mind. If an artist promotes bad(harmful) moral standards through his/her works, he/she is no longer an artist, and more importanly, he/she is immoral.