Aesthetic Ethics

'This volume arrives at a moment when psychology has grown increasingly estranged from the very experiences it once claimed to illuminate. Across its chapters, we are reminded that moral life cannot be reduced to compliance, calibration, or codified procedures. What emerges instead is a textured account of ethics as a matter of attention, relation, and aesthetic encounter. The authors take seriously the idea that beauty can unsettle us, that it can disrupt the sterile logics of self-optimization and invite us into forms of perception that resist abstraction. Rather than treating the aesthetic as decorative or indulgent, the book positions it as a condition for ethical responsiveness, for seeing the world and one another with care. In doing so, it gestures toward a psychology that has not forgotten how to wonder and that has room for what lingers unresolved.'

Justin M. Karter, Ph.D., Boston College

'For more than a hundred years, there has been an intense debate over which branch of philosophy could replace metaphysics as the first and most foundational way of knowing. Some have argued that ethics ought to take the place of primacy and be enshrined as our "first philosophy." Others, myself included, have championed the supremacy of aesthetics. With deftness and insight, the contributors to this volume demonstrate the proximity and reciprocity of the Good and the Beautiful in ways that their intellectual forerunners would no doubt have envied.'

Matthew Clemente, Ph.D., author of Bacchus Agonistes: Metarealism and the Future of Art

'Aesthetic Ethics is poised to become a landmark text, reminding us that being moved by beauty, form, and the sublime is no luxury but the very pulse of our personhood. The contributing authors reclaim the aesthetic as an inroad to moral imagination by illustrating how embracing our discarded, inferiorized aspects can ignite the exaltation and urgent vision needed to forge new possibilities for humanity.'

Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D., William James College