Art, Emotion and Ethics

Gaut defends ethicism: the view that an ethical flaw in a work of art is, other things being equal, an aesthetic flaw in it, and an ethical merit an aesthetic merit. He sets this out against rival views, including autonomism, which holds that ethical assessment is irrelevant to aesthetic value, and immoralism, which holds that ethical flaws can sometimes be aesthetic virtues. His main arguments are the merited-response argument, that a work which prescribes responses its audience should not have, such as amusement at cruelty, fails on its own terms, and the cognitive argument, that art can teach us and that getting things ethically wrong is a failure of understanding. Along the way he discusses how we can feel genuine emotions towards fictional characters, imaginative resistance, and examples from literature and film.

It sets out the long-running dispute about art and morality with precision, rather than as a slogan for one side.