It has never been easy to locate and identify values in relation to nature. The Greeks were already aware of the distinction between nomos, or variable custom, and physis, or the w
The development of interest among academic philosophers in the aesthetics of everyday life is somewhat analogous to the broader development in moral philosophy of ‘applied’ or prac
Can a work of art be defective aesthetically as art because it is defective morally? Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain both develop Thomistic accounts of the arts based on Aquina
Beauty is an important part of our lives. Ugliness too. It is no surprise then that philosophers since antiquity have been interested in our experiences of and judgments about beau
The relation between art, aesthetics, and ethics is intimate and longstanding. Arguably, the earliest humans possessed many of the practices – such as painting, sculpture, song, an
Traditionally, there were two opposing philosophical positions taken with respect to the legitimacy of the ethical evaluation of art: ‘moralism’ and ‘autonomism’, where moralism is
The practice of goodness is accompanied by spontaneous spiritual joy and moral beauty. Likewise, truth carries with it the joy and splendor of spiritual beauty. Truth is beautiful
None can sense more deeply than you artists, ingenious creators of beauty that you are, something of the pathos with which God at the dawn of creation looked upon the work of his h
Ethics and aesthetics are both spheres in which judgements of value (good and bad) and action (right and wrong) are made. This raises the question of how if at all they are aligned or interact. Is a morally repugnant film or novel aesthetically worse that a morally admirable one? Is a virtuous action beautiful, and a vicious one ugly? There are several views on these issues. According to moralism the moral character of an artwork is relevant to its aesthetic quality. According to autonomism they are entirely distinct. According to aestheticism the ethical character of an action may make it ‘fine’ or ‘beautiful’, (or ‘unfitting’ or ‘ugly’), while in opposition to this is another version of autonomism again separating the moral and the aesthetic. These matters have come to be discussed and debated because we do sometimes criticize art from a moral perspective and also describe virtue and vice in aesthetic terms. On the other hand, the two domains can seem to stand apart, as in the case of people of refined artistic capacity or aesthetic sensibility who may nevertheless be moral monsters, and people devoid of artistic sense and aesthetic feeling yet being models of moral goodness. A middle way through these positions may lie in saying that aesthetic or moral characteristics are relevant to but do not determine judgements in the other category.