ABSTRACT
Are the arts and sciences badly adapted to promoting our moral improvement? The last chapter suggested that they need not be, and that certain potentially powerful objections to the Kantian account that I favour could be met. One objection was that the arts and sciences are likely to have bad moral effects. Another was that morality is the wrong end for culture to promote. Even if these objections prove to be uncompelling, another remains to be considered—to the effect that the harmony between the arts and sciences depicted by Kant's account is an idealization. Far from working co-operatively toward a common end, the arts and sciences sometimes stake their own, more or less exclusive, claims to be morally improving. These claims can be accompanied by attitudes of mutual disapproval. From the perspective of the arts, scientists sometimes appear to lack a feeling for life and a capacity for moral imagination; while from the standpoint of scientists, novelists and artists sometimes appear not to grasp or care enough about the basic human needs that science provides the means of satisfying. In this chapter I shall argue that despite the existence of these unflattering images, the arts and sciences can be understood to be complementary means of human improvement. After rejecting one account of the way the arts and sciences complement one another, I shall propose another.
