Text for Semiotics website re Ethics in Chapter 9 of Bouissac, P. (2025). The Semiotics of Performance. London: Bloomsbury

Ethics and Performance

Chapter 9 of Bouissac’s text reflects on performance as a tool to promote political causes and this begs a series of ethical questions.  In the Western philosophical tradition the naming of one of Aristotle’s (384-322 BCE) central texts as The Ethics and another as The Politics, provides early evidence of both the distinctions between them and of their relationship.   At the risk of over-simplification political commitments are directed towards the use of power to the achievement of goods and the prevention of harms whereas ethical commitments are directed towards why certain outcomes or states are regarded as achieving goods or avoiding harms.

Take one case with which I was once involved as an ethics auditor.  An artist had used blood products in an exhibition of their work and a visitor fainted.  The ethical issue facing the institution was whether the goods achieved by exhibiting this work outweighed the harm that resulted; the political question was whether the exhibition should be discontinued to avoid further harm or whether this could be mitigated, for example by warning signs in which case the goods for both the artists and visitors would continue to be achieved.  It turned out that the Gallery had not considered the potential ethical concerns before mounting the exhibition and this raised another series of questions.

Question for consideration – What difference is there between the visitor who faints having not known the content of the exhibition and someone who faints with full knowledge.  And does that matter ethically?

This way of looking at ethics is focussed on justification.  In other words, what kinds of arguments and evidence provide good reasons for doing this rather than that.  But this broadly Aristotelian approach to ethics is not alone.  In the Western tradition, two other contenders have dominated ethical thinking.  For utilitarians, whose greatest thinkers include Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832 CE), ethical justification involves working out which of the available alternatives results in the greatest pleasure and the least pain for those affected and for supporters of notions of rights (both human and animal) judgments about ethics centre on whether a course of action protects and extends binding and inviolable rights (think of ‘a woman’s right to choose’).  In the words of legal scholar Ronald Dworkin (1932-2013 CE), ‘rights are trumps’.   

This variety of ethical approaches presents contemporary ethical thinkers with severe problems.  At the risk of oversimplification, he first is that these approaches have both internal conflicts and conflicts with each other.  The second is that there are other approaches to ethics (both religious and secular) which dispute all of them.  What is beyond dispute is that some people, and by and large these include the politically committed, exhibit a high degree of what psychologists refer to as ‘moral identity’; in other words, doing the right thing and seeing the right thing done, matters to them more than it does to others.  Political disputes have the irreconcilable and sometimes violent nature they do, precisely because competing parties not only think that they are ethically correct but that the other side is unethical – your enemy isn’t wrong, it is evil. 

Question for consideration – What difference does it make when you consider your opponent to be evil and no just wrong?

For artists, engagement in such territory might delimit potential audiences to those who agree with you or might.  Those outside this circle may both dispute the ethics that inform the claims the art is making but might also argue that performance spaces are inappropriate for making such claims at all.  Such audience members might see art as entertainment or perhaps as education but certainly not (as they see it) indoctrination and artists who convey a political message as misusing their power by ‘preaching’ to their audience.  There was a moment in the 1980s during a U2 concert where Bono asks his audience, ‘am I bugging you?’ when talking about the evils of apartheid South Africa; he clearly was.

Within circus, the classical and contemporary traditions fall out on this territory, amongst others.  For many within the classical tradition, circus is about entertainment through the display of achievement, whether physical, or comedic, whether by humans or by animals; by contrast for many in the contemporary circus world, circus is a form of expression in which the artist reveals what is most important to them, and if that happens to be a political or ethical commitment, so be it. 

As in many cases of ethical dispute, the contending parties disagree about what is at issue between them.  For those taking a radical ethical / political position all art and entertainment is political; the presentation of animals in a ring, doing what their human masters want them to do, is seen and both reproducing and justifying the dominance of people over animals, whilst animal trainers may see the presentation of liberty horses as an artistic achievement entertainment, their opponents see it as promoting the oppression of animals regardless of how well they are treated by the human companions outside the ring.  

Question for consideration – Fina an example of an artwork or performance that you think is not at all political and cannot be judged ethically?

In Chapter 9 we are introduced to a number of political performances including Abramovich’s self-mutilation (p151) which Bouissac contends was aimed to ‘cause the audience to break the conventional separation between the spectators and the performer’.  Different ethical traditions would evaluate this performance in very different ways.  A rights theorist might argue that the artist exercised their right to display, and their ownership of their own body in a way that challenged the right of any authority to prevent its display and damage.  A utilitarian’s judgment would be whether the direct self-harm experienced by the artist outweighed whatever benefits were to be gained by challenging the separation of performer and artist (a challenge which could be made without bodily damage, as evidenced in Dionysus in ’69, explored on the same page).  Not only is it unlikely that the utilitarian would believe that the performer had done the right thing but they would also question a legal regime which allows for performances of that type.  An Aristotelian may well argue that an artist engaging in such performance had an insufficient grasp of their own good such that their very freedom should be put in question; someone damaging themselves to such a degree should be looked after in an institution devoted to care of the mentally ill; likewise, with those who followed her lead at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2023.

Final Questions – Should the 2023 exhibition have been allowed go ahead.  Where might it not have been?

Ron Beadle is Professor Emeritus of Organisational and Business Ethics at Northumbria University