This book investigates the relation of art to morality, a topic that has been of central and recurring interest to the philosophy of art since Plato. The book explores the various positions that have been taken in this debate, and argues for ethicism — a position that holds that an artwork is always aesthetically flawed insofar as it possesses an ethical demerit that is aesthetically relevant. Three main arguments are developed for this view: these involve showing that moral goodness is a kind of beauty (the moral beauty argument); that art can teach us about morality and thereby often has aes ... More

This book investigates the relation of art to morality, a topic that has been of central and recurring interest to the philosophy of art since Plato. The book explores the various positions that have been taken in this debate, and argues for ethicism — a position that holds that an artwork is always aesthetically flawed insofar as it possesses an ethical demerit that is aesthetically relevant. Three main arguments are developed for this view: these involve showing that moral goodness is a kind of beauty (the moral beauty argument); that art can teach us about morality and thereby often has aesthetic value (the cognitive argument); and that our emotional responses to works are merited in part by ethical considerations (the merited response argument). In the course of its argument for the correctness of ethical criticism of art, the book also develops a new theory of the nature of aesthetic value, explores how art can teach us about the world and what we morally ought to do by guiding our imaginings, and argues that we can have genuine emotions towards people and events that we know are merely fictional. The book also examines several artworks in detail, showing how ethical criticism can yield rich and plausible accounts of works such as Rembrandt's Bathsheba and Nabokov's Lolita.