Moral beauty and education

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to rekindle a version of the age-old view that aesthetic education can contribute to the development of virtue. It proceeds as follows. First, it introduces the moral beauty view, whereby the moral virtues are beautiful, and the moral vices ugly, character traits. Second, two ways in which moral beauty and ugliness can manifest themselves are considered: in people and in artworks. Third, it is argued that character education couched partly in aesthetic terms, and coupled with the cultivation of a sensitivity to moral beauty and ugliness, promise a solid and motivationally robust anchor for moral character development. It is suggested that introducing the notions of moral beauty and ugliness in our conceptual repertoire, coupled with the presence of moral beauty in our surroundings, can undergird more traditional pathways to virtue, whilst being congenial to the maintenance of virtue. Before closing, three objections against these suggestions are addressed, and some avenues for exploring the notion of moral beauty vis-à-vis moral motivation and education are proposed.

KEYWORDS:

• moral virtue
• moral education
• beauty
• aesthetic education
• moral motivation

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Kristján Kristjánsson for feedback on an earlier version of this article and to Berys Gaut and Sarah Broadie for helpful comments on earlier versions of parts of this article. I am also grateful to three anonymous referees for the JME for very helpful comments that have improved this article. A version of this article was presented at the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues’ 2018 Annual Conference at Oriel College, Oxford; I would like to thank the audience there for helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a sample of these debates, see the articles in Classical Philology, 104(4), October 2010, dedicated to ‘Beauty, Harmony, and the Good’.

2. See, for instance, Eco (1986), for a useful discussion.

3. For a history of the moral beauty view, with a focus on its development in Germany, France and Britain, in the Enlightenment, see Norton (1995).

4. This way of formulating the view is due to Gaut (2007, p. 120). It is worth mentioning that although my focus here is beauty, I think that other aesthetic properties, including the sublime, elegant, or funny, can also be attributed to character traits. Moreover, I think that non-moral character traits, including the intellectual or performance virtues, may also have aesthetic qualities. While discussing these matters here as it would take me beyond the purview of this paper, I think that doing so would be a very worthwhile enterprise.

5. An obvious worry here is that there are some ugly people who are morally virtuous. But it is important here to clarify that I understand aesthetic evaluations in terms of beauty and ugliness to proceed in a pro tanto fashion. In other words, when we say that this or that thing is beautiful or ugly overall, our judgement comprises a number of more specific judgements, each of which may be qualified by an ‘insofar as’ clause, or by speaking of different respects in which something is beautiful or ugly. For instance, you may think that Les demoiselles d’Avignon is ugly insofar as its representational content goes, i.e., that the figures in it are ugly, but beautiful in terms of its composition. Or you may think that a novel by Charles Dickens is ugly in virtue of its sentimentality, but beautiful in terms of its story or language use. So in saying that X is ugly, we are not necessarily saying that X is ugly in every respect, but that it is ugly overall, i.e., all things considered. Thus, there is no problem in saying that someone who is ugly in respect of their physical appearance is also beautiful in respect of their character.

6. The qualifications and views in this paragraph are developed and defended in Gaut (2007). Similar points are made in McGinn (1997), but there are problems with his view that Gaut (2007) addresses. The most recent work on the moral beauty view is by myself (Paris, 2018a, 2018b).

7. For other recent defences of the view that appeal to thought experiments and intuitions, see McGinn (1997) and Gaut (2007). While their views are slightly different, these differences do not bear on any of the issues discussed in this paper and so shall be set aside.

8. See Nehamas (2007, p. 59).

9. If the reader disagrees with these examples, I encourage her to delve into her own experience with artworks and consider whether or not there are any that support my case.

10. This is true of Shaftesbury (2001), and is implied in Hume (1975) and Hutcheson (2004), as well as being a staple of Schiller’s philosophy; see, for instance, Schiller (2016).

11. While the subject of this painting is not known, and the title derives from an interpretation of the painting which is no longer thought to be valid, it seems fairly clear that it deals with human love. Since it is this that concerns me here, I shall refrain from getting bogged down in interpretative debates.

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Panos Paris

Panos Paris is an Associate Lecturer at the University of York, Associate Tutor at Birkbeck, University of London and a Trustee of the British Society of Aesthetics. Panos works in aesthetics, ethics and the relationship between them. He has published articles on moral beauty, on the moralism debate in aesthetics, on ugliness and on moral psychology. Panos is currently developing a theory of beauty; critically examining naturalistic accounts of ethical and aesthetic value; and thinking about the aesthetics and ethics of serialised cinematic works.