An Essay on Defending the Possibility of Ethical Criticism of Art

As many have said, “ethical criticism of art” has been the most enduring topic in the philosophy of art; but, in this broad topic, we must distinguish two problems: the first is the possibility of ethical criticism of artworks, and the second is the relevance of such criticism to the aesthetic value of artworks. In other words, the first problem is whether we can reasonably engage in ethical criticism of artworks or not, whereas the second problem is whether the ethical criticism of an artwork relates to the aesthetic criticism of it. This essay, however, is just about the second problem. To deal with the problem, we firstly divided the arguments against ethical criticism of art into three divisions - ontological, epistemological, and methodological - and then, gathering the arguments for the possibility of such criticism, from radical moralism to moderate autonomism and even “immoralism”, we attempted to meet the opponents and show that it can be reasonable to criticize ethically.