Most art, good or bad, doesn't result in much discussion. Most is just kind of there. Putting out a few thousand extra shitty books doesn't add much besides noise.
The analogy someone made to the unused film from a movie is a pretty good one. The world isn't really missing much by not seeing fifty eight flubbed variations on Sean Connery saying "Welcome to the Rock!"
The only way to determine the value of art is to put it out to public view, so this isn't a good argument for destroying art. This thread already has numerous examples of the artists or other professionals severely fucking up in their determinations, and a decent number of authors don't become popular until much later, or even after death.
Work should be identified if it is edited after the fact, was rough papers, etc. but particularly when we don't need to run the town's printing press, but can just throw it into a petabyte database, there's simply no reason to destroy anything which a reasonable person could anticipate as having value.
There is the search issue, but that's reasonably fixable and becoming easier every day.
Upon further reflection I find it interesting that several people said that publishers have no ethical obligations beyond profitability. Does anybody disagree with that? Is that low standard something we should hold all corporations to, or is art/publishing somehow special?
Yes, I let this go in my post since it wasn't the central focus, but I disagree with it and I think it is ridiculous not to disagree with it. Publishers obviously have ethical obligations beyond profitability. (Profitability is not even an ethical obligation.) Publishers have an obligation not to commit genocide, for instance. Luckily book publishers are rarely in a position to commit genocide, and even if they were, they'd have no reason to do so, but still, it's blatantly obvious that the position "publishers have no ethical obligations beyond making money" cannot be true. It remains to be discussed whether they have ethical obligations of a more stringent variety, like an obligation not to publish a work even if it would bring lots of joy to people or an obligation to the public not to publish Harper Lee's shitty book for a quick buck, but clearly these debates cannot be resolved just by claiming that publishers have no ethical obligations whatsoever beyond making cash. That is clearly false.
At SDCC this year, somebody asked Stephen Moffat, the current showrunner of both Dr. Who and Sherlock, if we would ever see a crossover between the two characters. Moffat responded that he made that already when he was a teenager, so he felt no need to do it again now. That's the mentality I'm talking about. There used to be a divide between authors and fanfic writers, but now the fans are in charge. Authorized or not (and these days that means new entries are simply canonized by the estates of long-dead authors, corporate owners of intellectual property, or the grace of the public domain), the works themselves do not differ in spirit from high quality fanfiction.
I disagree. Most writers have been writing for longer than they've been getting paid for it. Heck, stuff like the Metamorphoses, or the Aeneid, are just writing down the most popular version of a common story, not something that was created in the author's head. (Granted, the skill involved is significantly higher, but the point is that it isn't "original"). Shakespeare himself used the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe like 3 times. The internet just plunged the bar to public access way underground, so we get the stuff that was normally burnt or trashed or kept in a drawer forever with extreme embarrassment or whatever.
Most art, good or bad, doesn't result in much discussion. Most is just kind of there. Putting out a few thousand extra shitty books doesn't add much besides noise.
The analogy someone made to the unused film from a movie is a pretty good one. The world isn't really missing much by not seeing fifty eight flubbed variations on Sean Connery saying "Welcome to the Rock!"
The only way to determine the value of art is to put it out to public view, so this isn't a good argument for destroying art. This thread already has numerous examples of the artists or other professionals severely fucking up in their determinations, and a decent number of authors don't become popular until much later, or even after death.
Work should be identified if it is edited after the fact, was rough papers, etc. but particularly when we don't need to run the town's printing press, but can just throw it into a petabyte database, there's simply no reason to destroy anything which a reasonable person could anticipate as having value.
There is the search issue, but that's reasonably fixable and becoming easier every day.
Sort of an interesting question.
Is it better to have ten million pieces of work, with 5 percent of it being great, or a hundred million pieces of work, with 1 percent of it being great?
We're already at a point where nobody can ever possibly consume every piece of work they would find great. The problem is identifying it. Is there really a great public service in driving down the signal to noise ratio?
I mean, ignoring the question of whether we should tell artists to fuck off and hand over their hard drives. Before we wonder how much utility is worth pissing all over the right to privacy, we might want to figure out if there's any utility at all.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
Upon further reflection I find it interesting that several people said that publishers have no ethical obligations beyond profitability. Does anybody disagree with that? Is that low standard something we should hold all corporations to, or is art/publishing somehow special?
Yes, I let this go in my post since it wasn't the central focus, but I disagree with it and I think it is ridiculous not to disagree with it. Publishers obviously have ethical obligations beyond profitability. (Profitability is not even an ethical obligation.) Publishers have an obligation not to commit genocide, for instance. Luckily book publishers are rarely in a position to commit genocide, and even if they were, they'd have no reason to do so, but still, it's blatantly obvious that the position "publishers have no ethical obligations beyond making money" cannot be true. It remains to be discussed whether they have ethical obligations of a more stringent variety, like an obligation not to publish a work even if it would bring lots of joy to people or an obligation to the public not to publish Harper Lee's shitty book for a quick buck, but clearly these debates cannot be resolved just by claiming that publishers have no ethical obligations whatsoever beyond making cash. That is clearly false.
It is always unethical to publish fan fiction. Or make anyone read it. Or mention that it exists.
Paradise Lost is just Bible fanfiction.
[quick post, because I got to catch a bus, so I may be rambling a bit here. Hope my point comes accross]
Is it not? Profitability will keep the publisher afloat, providing for the authorand ensuring that my employees will have an income and by extension my and their family. As an employer the welfare of my employees and of my family is certainly an ethical obligation (though I know that many actual companies hold very different views. I'm lucky working for a company that doesn't).
A bestseller also will offset the risks of publishing works by unknown authors, making it possible to publish works of art that may not be profitable.
Now I'm not saying that profitability is the sole obligation of a publisher, but it does have a place in the final decision whether to publish something or not beyond simple greed.
I think in case number 5 I would probably tell him he can find someone else to burn his writings if I really thought they were that valuable. I would respect his wishes but damned if I am going to carry them out, friend or not. Saying you will burn them, then publishing them is the unethical thing there.
There is probably some grey area of offering the works to some people in the academic world and asking them if they think they are valuable? I don't know.
The creating process that an author went through to create an important piece of literature would totally be valuable. It could help understand authorial intent, see how you revised drafts, what you thought was bad, find new ideas that you did not include that still might be valuable to explore for others, ect.
He's a shy overambitious dog-catcher on the wrong side of the law. She's an orphaned psychic mercenary with the power to bend men's minds. They fight crime!
Upon further reflection I find it interesting that several people said that publishers have no ethical obligations beyond profitability. Does anybody disagree with that? Is that low standard something we should hold all corporations to, or is art/publishing somehow special?
Yes, I let this go in my post since it wasn't the central focus, but I disagree with it and I think it is ridiculous not to disagree with it. Publishers obviously have ethical obligations beyond profitability. (Profitability is not even an ethical obligation.) Publishers have an obligation not to commit genocide, for instance. Luckily book publishers are rarely in a position to commit genocide, and even if they were, they'd have no reason to do so, but still, it's blatantly obvious that the position "publishers have no ethical obligations beyond making money" cannot be true. It remains to be discussed whether they have ethical obligations of a more stringent variety, like an obligation not to publish a work even if it would bring lots of joy to people or an obligation to the public not to publish Harper Lee's shitty book for a quick buck, but clearly these debates cannot be resolved just by claiming that publishers have no ethical obligations whatsoever beyond making cash. That is clearly false.
[quick post, because I got to catch a bus, so I may be rambling a bit here. Hope my point comes accross]
Is it not? Profitability will keep the publisher afloat, providing for the authorand ensuring that my employees will have an income and by extension my and their family. As an employer the welfare of my employees and of my family is certainly an ethical obligation (though I know that many actual companies hold very different views. I'm lucky working for a company that doesn't).
If you can best ensure the welfare for your employees and of your family by being profitable, and if this doesn't conflict with other duties, then this is a good justification for acting so as to be profitable. This does not mean you have a duty to be profitable or that this is your only duty. For instance, I have a duty to grade my students' papers, and I do this by typing comments on my computer then printing them out. This does not mean that I have a duty to type comments on my computer and then print them out: if I could grade papers in some other way, this could be fine. Nor does it mean that my only duty is to type comments on my computer, or even that my only duty is grading papers. I have a duty not to murder anyone.
A bestseller also will offset the risks of publishing works by unknown authors, making it possible to publish works of art that may not be profitable.
This is another reason to think that there is a justification for undertaking actions that may be profitable, but it does not show that this is a duty, nor does it show that it is a publisher's only duty.
Now I'm not saying that profitability is the sole obligation of a publisher, but it does have a place in the final decision whether to publish something or not beyond simple greed.
I was disagreeing with two things: I was disagreeing that profitability is the only duty publishers have and I was also disagreeing that profitability was itself even an ethical duty. Your examples haven't convinced me that I'm wrong about either statement. It might be true that profitability could help keep my company afloat, and because I have a duty to provide for the welfare of my employees and my family I should keep the company afloat by being profitable, but if the best way to promote the welfare of my employees and my family is to do something that isn't profitable (by raising wages, for instance) then I don't think I'm violating any duty I have, let alone my only duty.
Out of the context of this thread: I think if you're hired to be profitable, you have an ethical duty to work toward profitability. It's not your only ethical duty, but if you agree to work in some capacity where your decisions directly impact profitability, then it is an ethical duty. It needs to be balanced out against other ethical duties.
But as I said before I don't much care about that when we're talking about cultural dissemination of art. The publication industry is broken in my opinion.
I think in case number 5 I would probably tell him he can find someone else to burn his writings if I really thought they were that valuable. I would respect his wishes but damned if I am going to carry them out, friend or not. Saying you will burn them, then publishing them is the unethical thing there.
There is probably some grey area of offering the works to some people in the academic world and asking them if they think they are valuable? I don't know.
The creating process that an author went through to create an important piece of literature would totally be valuable. It could help understand authorial intent, see how you revised drafts, what you thought was bad, find new ideas that you did not include that still might be valuable to explore for others, ect.
But that process is absolute domain and property of the author, untill he chooses to publish it. The process, or product of an artist is not something beyond him, it is in escence a part of him, and the author should always have last say in what happens to his work, or how its used, EVEN if it has been published. You can choose not to have your work or name displayed against your will, ultimately, the responsability to carry out those wishes will fall into whoever owns the rights of the author who passed away, and we have to assume that the author was aware of who he was passing his rights to. (example, the Zappa Trust, publishing F.Zappa work)
Now, if there is an express will (in writting, like a proper will) that certain works should not be published, and then someone goes and publishes it, it should not be an ethical or moral issue, but a legal one.
Yes, with a quick verbal "boom." You take a man's peko, you deny him his dab, all that is left is to rise up and tear down the walls of Jericho with a ".....not!" -TexiKen
4 is a qualified yes contingent upon seeing the original notes. I don't want to publish Hemingway's wife's collaboration with her dead husband. Or maybe I do, but I want her name on the jacket too.
Upon further reflection I find it interesting that several people said that publishers have no ethical obligations beyond profitability. Does anybody disagree with that? Is that low standard something we should hold all corporations to, or is art/publishing somehow special?
Yes, I let this go in my post since it wasn't the central focus, but I disagree with it and I think it is ridiculous not to disagree with it. Publishers obviously have ethical obligations beyond profitability. (Profitability is not even an ethical obligation.) Publishers have an obligation not to commit genocide, for instance. Luckily book publishers are rarely in a position to commit genocide, and even if they were, they'd have no reason to do so, but still, it's blatantly obvious that the position "publishers have no ethical obligations beyond making money" cannot be true. It remains to be discussed whether they have ethical obligations of a more stringent variety, like an obligation not to publish a work even if it would bring lots of joy to people or an obligation to the public not to publish Harper Lee's shitty book for a quick buck, but clearly these debates cannot be resolved just by claiming that publishers have no ethical obligations whatsoever beyond making cash. That is clearly false.
[quick post, because I got to catch a bus, so I may be rambling a bit here. Hope my point comes accross]
Is it not? Profitability will keep the publisher afloat, providing for the authorand ensuring that my employees will have an income and by extension my and their family. As an employer the welfare of my employees and of my family is certainly an ethical obligation (though I know that many actual companies hold very different views. I'm lucky working for a company that doesn't).
If you can best ensure the welfare for your employees and of your family by being profitable, and if this doesn't conflict with other duties, then this is a good justification for acting so as to be profitable. This does not mean you have a duty to be profitable or that this is your only duty. For instance, I have a duty to grade my students' papers, and I do this by typing comments on my computer then printing them out. This does not mean that I have a duty to type comments on my computer and then print them out: if I could grade papers in some other way, this could be fine. Nor does it mean that my only duty is to type comments on my computer, or even that my only duty is grading papers. I have a duty not to murder anyone.
A bestseller also will offset the risks of publishing works by unknown authors, making it possible to publish works of art that may not be profitable.
This is another reason to think that there is a justification for undertaking actions that may be profitable, but it does not show that this is a duty, nor does it show that it is a publisher's only duty.
Now I'm not saying that profitability is the sole obligation of a publisher, but it does have a place in the final decision whether to publish something or not beyond simple greed.
I was disagreeing with two things: I was disagreeing that profitability is the only duty publishers have and I was also disagreeing that profitability was itself even an ethical duty. Your examples haven't convinced me that I'm wrong about either statement. It might be true that profitability could help keep my company afloat, and because I have a duty to provide for the welfare of my employees and my family I should keep the company afloat by being profitable, but if the best way to promote the welfare of my employees and my family is to do something that isn't profitable (by raising wages, for instance) then I don't think I'm violating any duty I have, let alone my onl
I think that most people would agree that a carpenter is obligated to build a house when he is paid money to do so (even if his family would be better off if he stayed home)
Likewise a editor who is paid money to find profitable books has an obligation to do so.
+1
Options
AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
I think the more pertinent question is whether an editor has the moral/ethical obligation to publish quality books, or if they're only obligated toward what they believe will sell.
I think a publisher has an ethical obligation to sell things that they feel will satisfy the customer, and sell them in an honest fashion. I don't believe this requires some adherence to a poorly defined minimum standard of subjective "quality".
If the public wants Dan Brown, it's not unethical to give them Dan Brown. If they want Dan Brown and you give them Franz Kafka, you're foolish at best. If you give them Franz Kafka while implying you will give them Dan Brown, that's unethical.
I do think it's problematic to try and establish standards of subjective quality as some kind of moral issue.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
I think a publisher has an ethical obligation to sell things that they feel will satisfy the customer, and sell them in an honest fashion. I don't believe this requires some adherence to a poorly defined minimum standard of subjective "quality".
If the public wants Dan Brown, it's not unethical to give them Dan Brown. If they want Dan Brown and you give them Franz Kafka, you're foolish at best. If you give them Franz Kafka while implying you will give them Dan Brown, that's unethical.
I do think it's problematic to try and establish standards of subjective quality as some kind of moral issue.
Even if, say, the fabricated identity of an author helps to provoke valuable new thoughts and feelings in readers?
I made a game! Hotline Maui. Requires mouse and keyboard.
I assume you're talking about pseudonyms? I don't think that's problematic if you're representing the nature of the work honestly. If it's a tense thriller and you market it as a romance novel so that you can trick housewives into buying it, that's shitty. Then again, if the author wanted the book to start out looking like a romance novel and then transition to a thriller to make some point about the nature of the genre, or something, I think that gets a pass.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
I think if the dishonesty is itself a part of an interesting statement, as with Naked Comes the Stranger, or whenever a celebrity author tries writing under an unknown pen name, I don't really have a problem with it. Ghostwritten works with celebrity authors' names in giant print on the front despite their total lack of involvement in the project are a bit less defensible. The reason for the apparent inconsistency is simple and comes back to the question of whether publishers are supposed to make profits or quality works.
The answer to that question is, of course, both. We gave them copyrights so that they could "promote the progress of science and useful arts." By legal fiat, our society has made it possible to use the market to assign value to art, because even as flawed a solution as that obviously is we haven't really come up with a better one. So when they publish - at an obvious loss - prominent authors' works with different names on the cover, it's hard to get upset about the injustice of it all. But when the reverse happens, you get the feeling that the public interest is being messed with.
This is why the attempt to market Go Set a Watchman as a sequel is nearly as concerning to me as the allegations of elder abuse. Not only do we know for sure that it happened, unlike the other, but it's also a clear violation of the underlying purpose of publishing. You could have a fuzzy argument about whether Tom Clancy's Net War is one such, but false advertisement of a rough draft is a hell of a lot more blatant. It's the sort of thing that makes you wonder why we still have publishers around, exactly.
When it was expensive to print and bind books they had an obvious function as a species of manufacturer and a non-obvious function as gatekeepers, keeping the signal-to-noise ratio in check. Today, publishers are almost entirely gatekeepers with the manufacturing issues mostly a sideshow, and that isn't in and of itself a bad thing. It's just that if almost their entire existence consists of selecting manuscripts according to market conditions that they have in large part created themselves (Buy all steampunk! No more steampunk! Buy every supernatural teen romance! No more supernatural teen romances! Buy all dystopian future... etc) we should be able to expect that at least they're doing their marketing honestly.
Your author is your best friend, and also quite possibly the greatest literary genius of the century. He’s always been extremely self-critical, and out of every ten manuscripts he produced he’d usually destroy nine of them. Despite this, he’s built up a pretty serious collection of writings, and pretty much all of it is exceptionally brilliant.
Only a handful of his short stories have been published – a small proportion of his life’s writing work. And now he tells you he’s dying. He’s dying, and he tells you that after he’s dead he wants you to take all of his writing – stories, novels, journals, letters, everything – and burn it. Don’t read, just burn. He never wanted fame or recognition, and since these are things particularly useless to a dead man, he wants you to destroy it all.
And so he dies. And you’ve got all this stuff. You can either respect his request and burn everything, or you can disobey his dying wishes and get it all published instead – invoking his wrath from beyond the grave, maybe, but also enriching the culture of the world for centuries to come.
Do you publish it?
This one i have trouble grappling with.
On one hand: I think we do have some duty to fulfill reasonable requests of the deceased. It's the last quest they'll ever be making anyway, so why not? "Burn these manuscripts," is also not a big ask (well, it is, but I mean in terms of actual property value lost & time that must be committed to the act).
On the other hand: I do think an author's work becomes, in some sense, an agent unto itself. I don't know that an author should be able to reserve the right to assume total control over - much less order the total destruction of - their creative properties.
On the other other hand: I really do not think someone is going to say something like that if they are of sound mind. If they've only made this request after they have started dying, well, obviously they aren't in the best state of mind right now. Is that what they would've really wanted while they were still the person who was my friend? I'm guessing not. A desire to have all of your work put to the torch is not exactly normal.
I think I would publish it, but without attaching a publisher's name to it and immediately surrendering the works to the public domain.
I assume you're talking about pseudonyms? I don't think that's problematic if you're representing the nature of the work honestly. If it's a tense thriller and you market it as a romance novel so that you can trick housewives into buying it, that's shitty. Then again, if the author wanted the book to start out looking like a romance novel and then transition to a thriller to make some point about the nature of the genre, or something, I think that gets a pass.
I was thinking more like authors who somehow strengthen the impact or popularity of a book with a false backstory for their pseudonym.
Say, a white author who deceives readers about his race, and then implies that the fictional book is somewhat autobiographical. It's not, but that lie enhances the emotional impact for some of the readers. Fraud? Unethical cultural appropriation? Or maybe an excusable way to enhance his art.
Maybe a black author writes under a white-sounding pseudonym to evade racist tendencies in book buyers. Or a woman might pose as a man to write in a genre where readers tend to prefer books written by men.
kedinik on
I made a game! Hotline Maui. Requires mouse and keyboard.
I'm fairly sympathetic to authors using false identities to overcome prejudice (say, George Sands). Less so to authors exploiting racial sympathies to cynically profit from them (do we have any examples of that? Like, a real life DeaconBlues?)
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
I'm fairly sympathetic to authors using false identities to overcome prejudice (say, George Sands). Less so to authors exploiting racial sympathies to cynically profit from them (do we have any examples of that? Like, a real life DeaconBlues?)
The Thug Kitchen bloggers/cookbook authors? Closest that comes to mind right now.
0
Options
Captain Marcusnow arrives the hour of actionRegistered Userregular
I'm fairly sympathetic to authors using false identities to overcome prejudice (say, George Sands). Less so to authors exploiting racial sympathies to cynically profit from them (do we have any examples of that? Like, a real life DeaconBlues?)
Not sure about racial, but there are various authors that claim to have had a military history to sell war/military novels, which turned out to be fabricated. ( A real life Four Leaf Tayback if you want). Which ranks not very high on the unethical list for me personally (still unethical).
I think the more pertinent question is whether an editor has the moral/ethical obligation to publish quality books, or if they're only obligated toward what they believe will sell.
Oh, they are definitely not only obligated towards profibility. Even if it's going to sell blockbusters and my people are starving, I will not publish "Mein Kampf II: Kampf Härter".
I hope that most publishers (barring the vanity press, which I don't count for this discussion) have at least a minimum demand of quality for every book they publish. You also have responsibility towards your customers. In reality, you'd to set your quality demands at a reasonable level. Exactly where the intersection of minimum quality/minimum profibility lies for will be hard for a hypothetical discussion and would change from book to book.
A friend once told me a specific real-life example of an author posing as a racial minority, but unfortunately I've forgotten it.
John Howard Griffin, a white journalist, spent six weeks in 1959 passing as African American and wrote Black Like Me about it.
Not quite the same. Griffin never claimed to actually be black when he published the book. If anything it wouldn't have been nearly as successful if he had.
I hope that most publishers (barring the vanity press, which I don't count for this discussion) have at least a minimum demand of quality for every book they publish. You also have responsibility towards your customers. In reality, you'd to set your quality demands at a reasonable level. Exactly where the intersection of minimum quality/minimum profibility lies for will be hard for a hypothetical discussion and would change from book to book.
I wouldn't say the publishers have a minimum demand of quality. They have a minimum demand of profitability, though, which kind of works out similarly.
Like, the Twilight books are shit. The Fifty Shades books are, amazingly, even worse. Both of them sell like whoa, however, so when Meyer or James came around pushing their sequels, they were happy to snap them up. (A little different with James, since I think her book started out as a self-published eBook, but I'm not positive about that.)
Should the publishers have refused to publish them, because they sucked? Neglecting the fact that both books have some extremely problematic portrayals of women and healthy relationships for a moment, and just going with the part where they are turds, should the publishers have refused to publish them on ethical grounds? I'd say no. Because even if I think they're terrible, millions of people disagree. What makes my opinion on quality so special that I should get to decide?
As a practical matter, getting a traditional publishing deal usually means having an agent, and most agents will only represent work they personally enjoy on some level (and also know how to represent properly, which can be an annoying sticking point for an author). So there already is something of a quality gate.
The question becomes more interesting, though, when you look at where self-pubs are going. If the publisher has an ethical obligation to only publish quality works, regardless of how well it sells, does that extend to authors self-pubbing? Is it wrong of me to self-pub a shitty book? I don't even know how you'd measure that.
I mean, look at Rotten Tomatoes. Even the shittiest movies usually have a few positive reviews. Was it unethical of a movie studio to release a bad movie, given that at least some people appear to enjoy it?
That's the problem with setting "quality" as a moral or ethical issue. Pretty much everything appeals to someone, somewhere.
Which is why I feel that quality is irrelevant as long as the publishers aren't misrepresenting the work. If you read a shitty back-cover synopsis, and you open up the book and ready a shitty first page, and you still buy it, who am I to judge?
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
I think that most people would agree that a carpenter is obligated to build a house when he is paid money to do so (even if his family would be better off if he stayed home)
Likewise a editor who is paid money to find profitable books has an obligation to do so.
It was my impression that we were discussing the ethical obligations of the publisher, not of an editor hired by the publisher to discover books that the publisher could choose to publish or choose not to publish. I have not said anything about what I think the ethical duties of an editor are, and none of the thought experiments in the OP are about editors.
I think that most people would agree that a carpenter is obligated to build a house when he is paid money to do so (even if his family would be better off if he stayed home)
Likewise a editor who is paid money to find profitable books has an obligation to do so.
It was my impression that we were discussing the ethical obligations of the publisher, not of an editor hired by the publisher to discover books that the publisher could choose to publish or choose not to publish. I have not said anything about what I think the ethical duties of an editor are, and none of the thought experiments in the OP are about editors.
So you are only talking about a situation where the publisher is the CEO and sole owner of the company then?
I think that most people would agree that a carpenter is obligated to build a house when he is paid money to do so (even if his family would be better off if he stayed home)
Likewise a editor who is paid money to find profitable books has an obligation to do so.
It was my impression that we were discussing the ethical obligations of the publisher, not of an editor hired by the publisher to discover books that the publisher could choose to publish or choose not to publish. I have not said anything about what I think the ethical duties of an editor are, and none of the thought experiments in the OP are about editors.
So you are only talking about a situation where the publisher is the CEO and sole owner of the company then?
I was taking "publisher" to refer to the company, not to the individuals within the company, so I took myself to be talking not just about people who are sole owners of publishing companies but also about the mass of individuals that the company comprises, taken as a group actor.
I think that most people would agree that a carpenter is obligated to build a house when he is paid money to do so (even if his family would be better off if he stayed home)
Likewise a editor who is paid money to find profitable books has an obligation to do so.
It was my impression that we were discussing the ethical obligations of the publisher, not of an editor hired by the publisher to discover books that the publisher could choose to publish or choose not to publish. I have not said anything about what I think the ethical duties of an editor are, and none of the thought experiments in the OP are about editors.
So you are only talking about a situation where the publisher is the CEO and sole owner of the company then?
I was taking "publisher" to refer to the company, not to the individuals within the company, so I took myself to be talking not just about people who are sole owners of publishing companies but also about the mass of individuals that the company comprises, taken as a group actor.
Oh, so how does group moral responsibility work?
If we agree that a CEO has an obligation to do the work she was paid (profit investors) for then wouldn't the group also be said to have a responsibility to as well?
I mean, I guess you could get everyone to agree for the project to not be about profit but there is of course a name for a company like that.
That is an interesting question but it has nothing to do with the ethics of publishing. Many other companies can be made up of groups and not all publishing companies need to be made up of groups.
At SDCC this year, somebody asked Stephen Moffat, the current showrunner of both Dr. Who and Sherlock, if we would ever see a crossover between the two characters. Moffat responded that he made that already when he was a teenager, so he felt no need to do it again now. That's the mentality I'm talking about. There used to be a divide between authors and fanfic writers, but now the fans are in charge. Authorized or not (and these days that means new entries are simply canonized by the estates of long-dead authors, corporate owners of intellectual property, or the grace of the public domain), the works themselves do not differ in spirit from high quality fanfiction.
I disagree. Most writers have been writing for longer than they've been getting paid for it. Heck, stuff like the Metamorphoses, or the Aeneid, are just writing down the most popular version of a common story, not something that was created in the author's head. (Granted, the skill involved is significantly higher, but the point is that it isn't "original"). Shakespeare himself used the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe like 3 times. The internet just plunged the bar to public access way underground, so we get the stuff that was normally burnt or trashed or kept in a drawer forever with extreme embarrassment or whatever.
The Aenead was a commissioned piece of propaganda meant to solidify the Julio-Claudian Dynasty's right to rule.
So, probably not the example you were looking for.
Posts
The only way to determine the value of art is to put it out to public view, so this isn't a good argument for destroying art. This thread already has numerous examples of the artists or other professionals severely fucking up in their determinations, and a decent number of authors don't become popular until much later, or even after death.
Work should be identified if it is edited after the fact, was rough papers, etc. but particularly when we don't need to run the town's printing press, but can just throw it into a petabyte database, there's simply no reason to destroy anything which a reasonable person could anticipate as having value.
There is the search issue, but that's reasonably fixable and becoming easier every day.
Paradise Lost is just Bible fanfiction.
I disagree. Most writers have been writing for longer than they've been getting paid for it. Heck, stuff like the Metamorphoses, or the Aeneid, are just writing down the most popular version of a common story, not something that was created in the author's head. (Granted, the skill involved is significantly higher, but the point is that it isn't "original"). Shakespeare himself used the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe like 3 times. The internet just plunged the bar to public access way underground, so we get the stuff that was normally burnt or trashed or kept in a drawer forever with extreme embarrassment or whatever.
Sort of an interesting question.
Is it better to have ten million pieces of work, with 5 percent of it being great, or a hundred million pieces of work, with 1 percent of it being great?
We're already at a point where nobody can ever possibly consume every piece of work they would find great. The problem is identifying it. Is there really a great public service in driving down the signal to noise ratio?
I mean, ignoring the question of whether we should tell artists to fuck off and hand over their hard drives. Before we wonder how much utility is worth pissing all over the right to privacy, we might want to figure out if there's any utility at all.
[quick post, because I got to catch a bus, so I may be rambling a bit here. Hope my point comes accross]
Is it not? Profitability will keep the publisher afloat, providing for the authorand ensuring that my employees will have an income and by extension my and their family. As an employer the welfare of my employees and of my family is certainly an ethical obligation (though I know that many actual companies hold very different views. I'm lucky working for a company that doesn't).
A bestseller also will offset the risks of publishing works by unknown authors, making it possible to publish works of art that may not be profitable.
Now I'm not saying that profitability is the sole obligation of a publisher, but it does have a place in the final decision whether to publish something or not beyond simple greed.
There is probably some grey area of offering the works to some people in the academic world and asking them if they think they are valuable? I don't know.
The creating process that an author went through to create an important piece of literature would totally be valuable. It could help understand authorial intent, see how you revised drafts, what you thought was bad, find new ideas that you did not include that still might be valuable to explore for others, ect.
This is another reason to think that there is a justification for undertaking actions that may be profitable, but it does not show that this is a duty, nor does it show that it is a publisher's only duty. I was disagreeing with two things: I was disagreeing that profitability is the only duty publishers have and I was also disagreeing that profitability was itself even an ethical duty. Your examples haven't convinced me that I'm wrong about either statement. It might be true that profitability could help keep my company afloat, and because I have a duty to provide for the welfare of my employees and my family I should keep the company afloat by being profitable, but if the best way to promote the welfare of my employees and my family is to do something that isn't profitable (by raising wages, for instance) then I don't think I'm violating any duty I have, let alone my only duty.
But as I said before I don't much care about that when we're talking about cultural dissemination of art. The publication industry is broken in my opinion.
But that process is absolute domain and property of the author, untill he chooses to publish it. The process, or product of an artist is not something beyond him, it is in escence a part of him, and the author should always have last say in what happens to his work, or how its used, EVEN if it has been published. You can choose not to have your work or name displayed against your will, ultimately, the responsability to carry out those wishes will fall into whoever owns the rights of the author who passed away, and we have to assume that the author was aware of who he was passing his rights to. (example, the Zappa Trust, publishing F.Zappa work)
Now, if there is an express will (in writting, like a proper will) that certain works should not be published, and then someone goes and publishes it, it should not be an ethical or moral issue, but a legal one.
4 is a qualified yes contingent upon seeing the original notes. I don't want to publish Hemingway's wife's collaboration with her dead husband. Or maybe I do, but I want her name on the jacket too.
Likewise a editor who is paid money to find profitable books has an obligation to do so.
If the public wants Dan Brown, it's not unethical to give them Dan Brown. If they want Dan Brown and you give them Franz Kafka, you're foolish at best. If you give them Franz Kafka while implying you will give them Dan Brown, that's unethical.
I do think it's problematic to try and establish standards of subjective quality as some kind of moral issue.
Even if, say, the fabricated identity of an author helps to provoke valuable new thoughts and feelings in readers?
The answer to that question is, of course, both. We gave them copyrights so that they could "promote the progress of science and useful arts." By legal fiat, our society has made it possible to use the market to assign value to art, because even as flawed a solution as that obviously is we haven't really come up with a better one. So when they publish - at an obvious loss - prominent authors' works with different names on the cover, it's hard to get upset about the injustice of it all. But when the reverse happens, you get the feeling that the public interest is being messed with.
This is why the attempt to market Go Set a Watchman as a sequel is nearly as concerning to me as the allegations of elder abuse. Not only do we know for sure that it happened, unlike the other, but it's also a clear violation of the underlying purpose of publishing. You could have a fuzzy argument about whether Tom Clancy's Net War is one such, but false advertisement of a rough draft is a hell of a lot more blatant. It's the sort of thing that makes you wonder why we still have publishers around, exactly.
When it was expensive to print and bind books they had an obvious function as a species of manufacturer and a non-obvious function as gatekeepers, keeping the signal-to-noise ratio in check. Today, publishers are almost entirely gatekeepers with the manufacturing issues mostly a sideshow, and that isn't in and of itself a bad thing. It's just that if almost their entire existence consists of selecting manuscripts according to market conditions that they have in large part created themselves (Buy all steampunk! No more steampunk! Buy every supernatural teen romance! No more supernatural teen romances! Buy all dystopian future... etc) we should be able to expect that at least they're doing their marketing honestly.
This one i have trouble grappling with.
On one hand: I think we do have some duty to fulfill reasonable requests of the deceased. It's the last quest they'll ever be making anyway, so why not? "Burn these manuscripts," is also not a big ask (well, it is, but I mean in terms of actual property value lost & time that must be committed to the act).
On the other hand: I do think an author's work becomes, in some sense, an agent unto itself. I don't know that an author should be able to reserve the right to assume total control over - much less order the total destruction of - their creative properties.
On the other other hand: I really do not think someone is going to say something like that if they are of sound mind. If they've only made this request after they have started dying, well, obviously they aren't in the best state of mind right now. Is that what they would've really wanted while they were still the person who was my friend? I'm guessing not. A desire to have all of your work put to the torch is not exactly normal.
I think I would publish it, but without attaching a publisher's name to it and immediately surrendering the works to the public domain.
I was thinking more like authors who somehow strengthen the impact or popularity of a book with a false backstory for their pseudonym.
Say, a white author who deceives readers about his race, and then implies that the fictional book is somewhat autobiographical. It's not, but that lie enhances the emotional impact for some of the readers. Fraud? Unethical cultural appropriation? Or maybe an excusable way to enhance his art.
Maybe a black author writes under a white-sounding pseudonym to evade racist tendencies in book buyers. Or a woman might pose as a man to write in a genre where readers tend to prefer books written by men.
A friend once told me a specific real-life example of an author posing as a racial minority, but unfortunately I've forgotten it.
The Thug Kitchen bloggers/cookbook authors? Closest that comes to mind right now.
The (extremely racist) guy who wrote The Outlaw Josey Wales falsely claimed to be a Cherokee and made an award-winning completely fake autobiography.
Not sure about racial, but there are various authors that claim to have had a military history to sell war/military novels, which turned out to be fabricated. ( A real life Four Leaf Tayback if you want). Which ranks not very high on the unethical list for me personally (still unethical).
Oh, they are definitely not only obligated towards profibility. Even if it's going to sell blockbusters and my people are starving, I will not publish "Mein Kampf II: Kampf Härter".
I hope that most publishers (barring the vanity press, which I don't count for this discussion) have at least a minimum demand of quality for every book they publish. You also have responsibility towards your customers. In reality, you'd to set your quality demands at a reasonable level. Exactly where the intersection of minimum quality/minimum profibility lies for will be hard for a hypothetical discussion and would change from book to book.
John Howard Griffin, a white journalist, spent six weeks in 1959 passing as African American and wrote Black Like Me about it.
Not quite the same. Griffin never claimed to actually be black when he published the book. If anything it wouldn't have been nearly as successful if he had.
I wouldn't say the publishers have a minimum demand of quality. They have a minimum demand of profitability, though, which kind of works out similarly.
Like, the Twilight books are shit. The Fifty Shades books are, amazingly, even worse. Both of them sell like whoa, however, so when Meyer or James came around pushing their sequels, they were happy to snap them up. (A little different with James, since I think her book started out as a self-published eBook, but I'm not positive about that.)
Should the publishers have refused to publish them, because they sucked? Neglecting the fact that both books have some extremely problematic portrayals of women and healthy relationships for a moment, and just going with the part where they are turds, should the publishers have refused to publish them on ethical grounds? I'd say no. Because even if I think they're terrible, millions of people disagree. What makes my opinion on quality so special that I should get to decide?
As a practical matter, getting a traditional publishing deal usually means having an agent, and most agents will only represent work they personally enjoy on some level (and also know how to represent properly, which can be an annoying sticking point for an author). So there already is something of a quality gate.
The question becomes more interesting, though, when you look at where self-pubs are going. If the publisher has an ethical obligation to only publish quality works, regardless of how well it sells, does that extend to authors self-pubbing? Is it wrong of me to self-pub a shitty book? I don't even know how you'd measure that.
I mean, look at Rotten Tomatoes. Even the shittiest movies usually have a few positive reviews. Was it unethical of a movie studio to release a bad movie, given that at least some people appear to enjoy it?
That's the problem with setting "quality" as a moral or ethical issue. Pretty much everything appeals to someone, somewhere.
Which is why I feel that quality is irrelevant as long as the publishers aren't misrepresenting the work. If you read a shitty back-cover synopsis, and you open up the book and ready a shitty first page, and you still buy it, who am I to judge?
So you are only talking about a situation where the publisher is the CEO and sole owner of the company then?
When news of it broke, people were not okay with it.
Oh, so how does group moral responsibility work?
If we agree that a CEO has an obligation to do the work she was paid (profit investors) for then wouldn't the group also be said to have a responsibility to as well?
I mean, I guess you could get everyone to agree for the project to not be about profit but there is of course a name for a company like that.
The Aenead was a commissioned piece of propaganda meant to solidify the Julio-Claudian Dynasty's right to rule.
So, probably not the example you were looking for.