Can Moral Flaws Count as Aesthetic Virtues?
In this paper I provide a new argument for contextualism about the relationship between moral and aesthetic value. I defend the claim that although the moral features of artworks are often aesthetically relevant, a moral flaw in an artwork does not always count as an aesthetic flaw. I then elaborate the conditions under which a moral flaw can count as an aesthetic merit.This argument relies on a clear definition of moral flaw’, and the distinction between two different kinds of moral flaw that, until now, have been treated as one and the same. Establishing that a work’s aesthetic value can increase in virtue of its having a moral flaw will depend on an argument for aesthetic cognitivism, the view that a work’s aesthetic value can increase in virtue of or be partly constituted by its cognitive value (the value that it possesses in virtue of what we can learn from it). Optimism about Aesthetic Testimony In the debate about the relationship between aesthetic testimony and justified belief
