Ethics and Aesthetics, Addendum

A few things off the back of yesterday's post.

First, here is a useful discussion (which I found after I had posted) applying this sort of concept to a concrete example.  I haven't looked into the background of it all, but the key thing for me is the awkward way in which aesthetic repugnance and moral repugnance can be confused, and the importance of clarity.

Secondly, it occurs to me that I should have said that we will rarely (never?) encounter pure ugliness in the ethical realm.  This is not because there is some inherent good in everyone which shines through even the darkest deeds; rather, it is because evil cannot overcome God's grace in creation and redemption.  Even where I have to make a negative ethical judgement on the basis of God's command, and train my aesthetic sense to a corresponding distaste, there will be something good, something praiseworthy, something beautiful.  Even when it is only the fact that God can and will weave even the most evil things into his overall story.

Thirdly, it would be useful to clarify that a disciplined aesthetic can be a great servant of ethical judgement.  It is easier to say 'no' to a wrong which I also see as ugly.  It is easier to detect evil when not only my ethical judgement but also my taste is attuned to good.

Fourthly, and more practically, I probably need to watch less TV, or perhaps just consume less popular culture in general.  It is hard to discipline myself to feel rightly in the realm of sexual ethics, for example, when I have just spent half an hour chuckling at the sexual antics of some character in a sitcom.

Ethics and Aesthetics

It seems pretty clear that ethics and aesthetics are linked.  Our views of what is good and what is beautiful are necessarily intertwined (just as they are both deeply connected to our views of what is true).  Just a couple of thoughts on regulating the connection:

1.  We must not let aesthetics lead ethics.  Of course, it is still fairly trendy in some circles to say that ethical judgements boil down in the end to just 'I like/don't like this'.  This cannot be true of Christian ethics.  When we say that something is morally wrong, we mean that it is objectively disordered, or - to get right to the heart of the issue - that it is disobedient to God's command.  Since this is a huge thing to say, we need to pretty careful about saying it.  In particular, I worry that sometimes our ethical judgements are too close to being judgements about taste.  'I am personally and culturally disposed to find this behaviour repulsive' is not the same as 'this is disobedient to God's command', and we need to be careful to ensure that we are not confusing the two.

2.  We must train aesthetics to follow ethics.  If truth, goodness, and beauty are genuinely connected - if they are all facets of God's one reality - then what is true and good is also beautiful, and I need to train myself to see it that way.  On the flipside, if sin is really sin as the Bible describes it, then it is also ugly, and I need to train myself to view it as such.  What I notice in myself is that I easily see the sins to which others are prone as ugly, whilst the transgressions which I tend toward are, in my mind, sometimes even beautiful.  Since I am not capable, ultimately, of disconnecting what God has connected - ethics and aesthetics - this inevitably means that I see the sins of others as ethically worse than my own, which is clearly not a helpful or a true viewpoint.  I need to train myself to loath my own sin, not only as wrong but also as ugly.