ABSTRACT
Questions about the relation of art to ethics run deep in the mainstream of the Western intellectual tradition. Plato in The Republic (1961) famously attacked almost all kinds of mimetic art for undermining reason at the expense of the unseemly stimulation of emotion and the advancement of a mere simulacrum of knowledge. A great deal of the subsequent debate about the value of art has been shaped by this seminal attack, so that the issue of the relation of art to ethics has been of recurrent and central interest both to philosophical aesthetics and to literary theory. These concerns are not merely academic: in popular culture worries abound about the ethics of some artworks, condemned because of their violence, explicit sexual content, sexism and so on.
