ABSTRACT
The practice of criticism owes its ethical dimension to the fact that in confronting and responding to a work of art, and in trying to capture something of the response in words, the critic must attempt to do justice to the work, attempt to do justice to his experience of the work and finally attempt, in articulating his experience, to order and negotiate between the various values by which that experience is informed. Interpretatively, there is no possibility of pluralism at all. The experience and the interpretation of it are too close together for that; indeed they are mutually constitutive. Artificial and schematic though it undoubtedly is, the example does enough to indicate in a crude way what kinds of outcome the critical negotiation of value may have. The just articulation of a critic's experience might, first, leave the critic's value-orderings unchanged, either because his experience of the work conforms to them, or because it fails to conform to them.
