ohn Dewey, who expresses the traditional liberal suspicion of socially normative art.
The theories that attribute direct moral effect and intent to art fail because they do not take account of the collective civilization that is the context in which works of art are produced and enjoyed. . . . But they tend to extract particular works, regarded as especially edifying, from their milieu and to think of the moral function of art in terms of a strictly personal relationship between the selected works and a particular individual (Dewey 529).
On this view, censorship bypasses the societal issues in favor of the exigencies of individual cases, or possibly individual censors. The liberal view argues that far from preserving morality, censorship absolves the citizenry of authentic moral resonsibility for its own institutions, in particular in the U.S. the First Amendment or statutory restrictions on the First Amendment. One may hide behind such institutions, protected by laws against whatever might reveal the hypocrisy or undfairness in the institutions themselves. Authority supplants responsibility, and authority lies with only the few.
This last-named point is in line with those who maintain that the state has a legitimate interest in legislating the constituents of art deemed obscene, "when the mode of dissemination carrid with it a significant danger of offending the sensibilities of unwilling recipients or of exposure to juveniles" (Miller v. California, 70-73, U.S., 1973). In the U.S., the censorship debate has generally proceeded along liberal versus conservative lines, with the conservative point of view generally prevailing as a matter of law before World War II, and particularly since 1973.
Beginning in the 1980s and continuing to the present period, a feminist critique of obscenity has emerged as distinct from both liberal and conservative positions. The feminist perspective is important because it is not uniform, and it ...