Card 5.6 · Root V — Aesthetics
Art and Morality
Can a beautiful work be evil, and still beautiful?
This node asks whether a work's moral character bears on its artistic value — and whether a morally corrupt work can be a good one.
Where it sits
Under V. Aesthetics. Borders 3.2 Normative ethics, 5.2.3 Interpretation, 6.32 Philosophy of film.
The rival answers
| Position | Claim |
|---|---|
| Radical autonomism | Moral features are simply irrelevant to artistic value |
| Moderate autonomism | A work can have moral defects that are not aesthetic defects |
| Moralism | Moral defects are always aesthetic defects |
| Ethicism | Moral merit counts toward aesthetic merit, other things equal |
| Immoralism | Moral defects can sometimes be aesthetic merits |
| Contextualism | Depends on what the work is doing and what it asks of the audience |
Key figures
| Figure | Dates | Tradition | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plato | 428–348 BCE | Greek | Poetry corrupts; exclude it from the city |
| Confucius | trad. 551–479 BCE | Chinese | Music and poetry as instruments of moral order |
| David Hume | 1711–1776 | European modern | The problem of imaginative resistance |
| Oscar Wilde | 1854–1900 | European modern | No such thing as a moral or immoral book |
| Noël Carroll | b. 1947 | Analytic | Moderate moralism |
| Berys Gaut | b. 1958 | Analytic | Ethicism |
Connections
→ 5.2, 5.3 · ↔ 3.2, 5.2.3, 6.32, 3.3.4 · ◇ autonomism, moralism, ethicism, immoralism · ○ Axial Age; Early modern; Modern; Table 10
→ narrower questions · ↔ questions it borders · ◇ the positions, mapped in Part III of the book · ○ the eras and comparison tables (Parts IV and V)
The full card is in the book
In The Coordinates of Thought this card goes on to a worked example that sets the answers against one case, and to where the question touches daily life — page 236.
On Coordinates of Thought
Conversations about this question in Beauty & art:
- Beauty is objective 6 replies
- The institutional theory of art is circular, and it’s the vicious kind 5 replies
- Hume’s ‘true judges’ are the best answer we have to whether taste can be wrong 5 replies
- I make cedar doors. Am I an artist, a craftsman, or is that the wrong question? 5 replies
- Reproduction did not wither the aura of art; it made the aura more valuable 5 replies