Flying from Atlanta to Philadelphia for a wedding, I found myself reading an interview inSky(Delta’s in-flight magazine) with Nikolaj Koster-Waldau, the actor who played Jaime Lannister (aka Kingslayer) onGame of Thrones.

NKW (as I’ll call him) is a far better person than the character he famously played. In addition to having impressive acting credentials (for example, an upcoming live run asMacbeth), he’s a humanitarian. He supports the Danish Red Cross and the RED foundation. He’s a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Goodwill Ambassador who raises awareness of climate change. And in 2018, he started The Lion’s Share fund, which pushes advertisers who use animal images to donate a portion of their media spending to support animal wellbeing.

But people do criticize him.

有一次，采访者问NKW，他是否认为他在屏幕上的角色“使堕落的行为正常化”是一个问题。

[剧透警告，但第四季之后不会有。]

这可以指很多东西。在这部剧的大部分时间里，NKW扮演的角色詹姆和他的双胞胎妹妹瑟曦发生了性关系。他还把一个名叫布兰的小男孩从高高的窗户推了出去，想杀了他，布兰却亲眼目睹了他们的行为。杰米是傲慢。他杀人毫无悔意。在第四季中，他甚至在乱伦所生儿子的尸体前，强迫自己接近瑟曦。(那是一场强奸戏吗?后面的点不依赖于这两种情况。But see analyseshereandherefor one point of view andherefor the other.)

The interviewer’s question about whetherGoTis “normalizing” bad behavior is a special case of a question that goes back toPlato.Is it immoral to produce fictional drama that represents bad or immoral behavior that people might emulate?

NKW had a witty retort: “it’s set in a world with dragons, so if we’re normalizing [depravity], we’re also normalizing a woman giving birth to three dragons!”

According to that, it’s foolish to take fiction as a guide to morality, since (1) allsortsof bad crazy things happen in fiction and (2) no one would want fiction to be without crazy and/or bad events. Who would want to sit through a two-hour movie in which characters only behaved well?

NKW has a point. To put something in a book or on screen is not to say it’s good. No one criticizes, say, Robert DeNiro for normalizing bank robbery inHeat.

But I still don’t think creators get a moralcarte blanche. The fact that it’ssometimesor evenusuallyacceptable to represent immoral or deviant behaviors in fiction doesn’t mean italwaysis. After all, as philosopherCristina Bicchieri has shown在美国，许多人确实会改变他们的社会规范来回应他们在屏幕上看到的行为(Bicchieri研究了印度肥皂剧对社会规范的影响)。

A hypothetical example makes the point. It would be wrong—obviously so—to make a film (fictional or otherwise) that revealed how to make a dirty bomb in one’s garage, since violent extremists would use that information in horrific ways.

Fictions, as works, have downstream effects in the world. Insofar as those effects are foreseeable, the creation of fiction can be morally appraised in light of them. One might object that, since the downstream effects involve other people (the consumers of the fiction)choosingto react in certain ways, the moral judgment should be onthose人而不是造物者，谁的手是干净的。但我不认为这种反应总是有效的，就像我假设的例子所显示的那样:人们通常要为他人实施的不良行为负责，尤其是当这些行为是可以预测的时候。世界杯赛程2022赛程表欧洲区

The tempting thing to think about all this is that there must be a fuzzy line somewhere in the space of possible creations-of-fiction such that aesthetic value lies on one side of the line and moral transgression on the other, with borderline cases on the line itself. From this perspective, the interviewer’s question to NKW was not absurd; rather, it was a sensible question about whether NKW honestly thought the fuzzy line had been crossed.

但我认为这种想法虽然很诱人，但并不正确。它将美学和道德价值视为一个统一体。相反，我认为评价的道德维度和审美维度是正交的。创作一部特定的虚构作品的行为完全有可能是不道德的，考虑到发行它的可预见后果，即使这部作品的美学质量很高。

An interesting example in this direction is Quentin Tarantino’sportrayal of heroin useinPulp Fiction, which both (1) made heroin seem cool and (2) served as a veritable instruction manual for shooting up. I have no wish to argue Tarantino was in the moral wrong for making that scene. But I would argue that, if he were to release a similar scene in the present day with the opioid crisis already raging, doing that would be immoral, because it would foreseeably fan the flames and lead to more deaths. Still, however, theaestheticqualities of the scene would be remarkable—the pacing of the scene, the camerawork, the way the images mesh with the mood of the music, etc.—as they were before. The immorality of the choice to create doesn’t imply a loss of aesthetic quality. In fact, on the contrary, it’sbecausethe aesthetic quality of Tarantino’s work is so high that he was able to make heroin use so attractive. So arguably, in such a case, the aesthetic quality of the scene and moral goodness of the choice to create areinverselyrelated, contrary to what the single continuum picture suggests: the better the aesthetics, the worse the morality of the choice to create, since better aesthetics would foreseeably encourage worse consequences (more heroin use).

I think peoplewantit to be the case that, when they find a work of fiction morally objectionable, they’re entitled to conclude it’s aesthetically valueless as well (after all, this would deprive the people who disagree with them of a way of defending the work in question). But I think the view that the aesthetic qualities and the moral dimensions are orthogonal better explains why controversies are so common. It isbecause如此多的作品——无论在何种程度上——在道德上令人反感，但同时又具有强烈的审美品质，以至于人们懒得为它们辩护。

Where does that leave NKW and his character Jaime Lannister onGoT? In that case, I don’t think the dilemma arises: theGoTworld was fantastical enough—and Jaime’s licentious actions (incest) were flagrantly wrong enough—that it’s hard to foresee that any significant number of people would adopt him as a role model. But we’ve come to an unsettling conclusion: though fiction is one of the most important sources of aesthetic value and value in general that humans have, creating it involves some moral risk—risk that’s not mitigated by the aesthetic quality of the work itself. And thus the conceptual security blanket we might have hoped for—the idea that morally bad art can’t be aesthetically good—doesn’t exist.

Image bySilentpilotfromPixabay