Thesis When we refuse to imagine that cruelty is admirable, the failure is the work’s, not ours
Where it stands
Hume noticed something odd near the end of his essay on taste. We forgive old poets for their speculative errors: the wrong science, the gods we no longer believe in. We read past them easily. But when a poet asks us to approve of vicious conduct, to find admirable what is cruel, we balk. Hume says, roughly, that he cannot and should not bend his moral sentiments to suit any poet, however fine the verse.
Philosophers much later gave this a name, imaginative resistance, and noticed how strange it is. I'll happily imagine dragons, time running backwards, a man who lives for a thousand years. But if a story tells me that, within its world, it was right to torture a child for a laugh, my imagination refuses, not just my approval.
My thesis is the position Berys Gaut calls ethicism. A work that asks for a response, admiration, amusement, sympathy, has failed in that respect if the response is not merited. When a work prescribes admiration for cruelty, the admiration is unmerited, readers rightly withhold it, and the work fails on its own terms. That is an aesthetic defect, not just a moral blemish sitting beside the art.
I have lived long enough to see cruelty enough. I don't think my refusal to admire it in fiction is squeamishness. I think it's the work asking for something it hasn't earned. Who wants to argue the other side?