Art, Emotion and Ethics

Can a good work of art be evil? Art, Emotion and Ethics explores this issue, arguing that artworks are always aesthetically flawed if they have a moral defect that is aesthetically relevant. Berys Gaut shows how moral goodness is itself a kind of beauty, that artworks can teach us about morality and that this is often an aesthetic merit in them, and that our emotional responses to works of art are properly guided in part by moral considerations.Characterised by its clarity and sustained argument, this book will be of interest to anyone who wants to understand the relation of art to morality.

Berys Gaut is Reader in Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews.