Art’s Rich Contribution to Ethics

Abstract

This book is a collection of invited essays on Ethics and the Arts. Most of the chapters were written without each author being familiar with other chapters and there is (unsurprisingly) a range of different approaches taken. Nevertheless, there is also a considerable degree of coherence between the chapters, which this concluding chapter addresses. The further aim is to examine the ways (in the particularities of each chapter) in which the arts can, and do, make a major contribution to ethics. The picture that emerges is of a two-way relationship between ethics and the arts. In this book, ethical concerns are discussed within the arts—but so too is ethics considered from the vantage point of the arts. In this chapter I take up this idea from both angles, in discussing the approaches taken by various authors toward ethics within their artform, as well as in drawing insights from the discussions of various ideas, art theories and practices, and a range of other disciplines, that may offer broader understandings of ethics. There are ethical issues that concern artists and a good many of them have been captured in chapters of this book.