Beauty and Ethics: Three Relations

After years of neglect, a renewed interest in beauty developed among many Western art critics, art practitioners and theorists of aesthetics in the 1990s. Beauty had fallen from favour in part because it was deemed politically and morally suspect, both as complicit with the sociopolitical structures that yielded WWI and as a tool of oppression wielded against women and minorities. One wonders, however, whether the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. Even granted that beauty has been damaging in the ways alluded to, can it yet be ethically helpful in ways that were lost when we ceased to attend to beauty (at least in the realms of institutional art and aesthetic theory if not in the day to day)? What ethical benefits might we have overlooked?The answer to this question depends partly on what one takes beauty to be. Beauty is a complex concept; there exist many competing and frequently contradictory accounts, often with deep roots, making the concept rife with internal contradictions. Rather than either attempt to reconcile conflicting accounts or address only one aspect of the concept, I will show that different sorts of relation to ethics emerge depending on how we approach beauty. I will present three different ways in which we can see beauty as related to ethics: beauty qua catalyst of ethical relation, qua formal cause of ethical relation, and qua analogue of ethical relation. The kinds of relation we see between beauty and ethics also depend on what style of ethics we consider. Despite the variety of approaches to beauty discussed, the connections I found tended to link beauty to particularistic versions of ethics. This may be due to beauty's longstanding association with the realm of particulars, making for an easy fit with ethics than emphasize attention to particulars.Ph.D