Third, the fact that he wrote great art doesn't mean that his methods weren't unethical. They are entirely separate issues in my book.

Or the point Burrell made earlier. I'm just saying unethical artists make great art and I'd rather have the art than the ethical artist.

Might I suggest, Hec-o-mine, that you're trying to argue a bunch of people out of their own ethical choices,

Honestly, I'm not. I think ethics is a very individual, almost private act and no less than your primary responsibility as a thinking person on this earth. To know and understand your own choices.

and that, as such, you're gonna fail even if you turn out to be Jesus Christ on a stick with divine revelation on your side, and all you're doing is testing tempers.

For which I apologize. I don't mean to stomp through everybody else's morality telling them to Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (C.O.Y.O.T.E.) - and maybe I have. Truly, I respect everybody's ethics and arguments here.

But I'll stick to my note at the top of this post: more important to have great art than ethical artists. They're not exclusive, but there will be times when they are in conflict. I wouldn't close that door to an artist on moral grounds. It's more important that Superstar be available than Karen Carpenter's estate be respected.

more important to have great art than ethical artists

More important to you, I'm assuming. Or are you positing that it's more important for humanity?

I'd rather have ethical art, myself. Much like I'd rather have ethical, say, medical research. Because it's not all about me, and what I experience. It's also about (in my own little worldview), about who suffered unwillingly to get me to that experience.

Or are you positing that it's more important for humanity?

Yes, I am saying this. It was wrong to ban Ullysses even if Joyce was immoral to libel people.

Why is it more important to humanity, then?

And is humanity required to participate in this great art, or may it abstain itself and shun the things it deems unseemly?

Have all the unethical art you please, David, but don't make me look at it against my will. I'll make that decision myself.

Kind of jumping in with a tangent, but what about people like David Sedaris? Who write presumably non-fiction, about real people with their real names, but embellish and generall make shit up to make it a better story? Where does that fall in the continuum?

And is humanity required to participate in this great art, or may it abstain itself and shun the things it deems unseemly?

Your choice of course.

Have all the unethical art you please, David, but don't make me look at it against my will. I'll make that decision myself.

Again, that's your biz and I'm sorry to have implied otherwise. I just don't see the arguments against RPF as being that hard or clear. As a matter of individual choice, nobody needs to justify their taste.

Why is it more important to humanity, then?

I'm not sure I'm clear on the question except what I said above: the value art brings to culture trumps my concerns about treading on privacy issues that people are using here. I can cite dozens of literary works which have abused the right-to-privacy and used real people in their work (either by name or barely disguised such that people who knew the artist and the characters would know who they were talking about). Dante's Inferno doesn't exist without him putting all of his (still living at the time) enemies in hell.

I'm not going to contend the quality of Ulysses or Dante's Inferno. But would the world be a demonstrably poorer place without them?

I'm going to swerve into complete hyperbole here, hovering around Godwin's law, but there are a *lot* of things one could do unethically to advance one field or another. I don't think doing them makes the world a better place.

I'm not going to contend the quality of Ulysses or Dante's Inferno. But would the world be a demonstrably poorer place without them?

I say yes.

edit: Don't mean to be so flip about it. Yes, a lot of unethical things could benefit humanity. I don't think writing about real people is (on balance) that big a deal.

I say yes.

And that is inarguably subjective.

I think, in any field, there are ethical boundaries. You think there aren't, at least in this one.

I think a world without Ulysses would be a world in which no one's read Ulysses, and a world in which someone else might have written something marvellous that filled that vacuum.

Please note I have NO opinion on Ulysses nor the RPF content within, and I also wasn't talking about Mengele. I was just talking about boundaries, some of which come loaded with historical baggage.