Question Dear sir/madam I would really appreciate it if you could help me please with finding the name of some books about early concept of the relation of art and morality. what I mean is after Plato and Aristotle to the time of Kant. Or if it is possible, please give me some names of philosophers during that time and then I'll try to find their books. I want to work on the early relation of them and later show how and why they became some how separate in later years. I guess Kant has the most effect on it but I still need more resources.

Accepted:
August 21, 2014

Comments

I wish you all the best in your research and thinking about art and ethics. Here are some contemporary thinkers you would find engaging: Noel Carroll --his "Moderate Moralism" (originally published in the British Journal of Aesthetics in 1996 is not the "latest" but Carroll is a clear, engaging writer and he references some of the contributors to the issues at hand. Jerrold Levinson has an excellent anthology on aesthetics and ethics, Berys Gaut is another philosopher of interest, and Martha Nussbaum has probably been the most well published contributor seeking to tie moral education together with literature.

In terms of early modern work, the "sentimentalists" (those who sought to understand both beauty and goodness) such as Hutchison would be good to investigate.

I have a short book "Aesthetics: A Beginner's Guide" that addresses the relationship of ethics, beauty and excellence or the value of art.

One reason for thinking that ethics trumps our concept of the autonomy of art (that is, thinking about the arts as quite independent of ethics) is that certain so-called "works of art" involving violence agains innocent persons would be described by most people as "crimes" "atrocities" "murder" rather than "works of art" or "works of art that involve unjust, criminal acts"... Imagine OJ Simpson claimed that he did kill his wife and her friend but this was a work of art (a happening). If this was taken seriously and art journals like Art in America ran reviews of the murder in terms of the event's aesthetic features, I think most people would think it was a bad joke or a matter of irony or, if serious, the magazine should be re-named Crime in America or Confused in America or some such variant.