ABSTRACT
In al-Ghazālī's works on the virtues, we find an ongoing concern with the theme of beauty and a pervasive enmeshment of the ethical and the aesthetic. Both the nature of virtue and the nature of moral motivation are located in an aesthetic context. The best type of moral motivation is in fact a response to God's beauty and an attempt to imitate God's perfection. Al-Ghazālī's most extensive discussion of moral beauty takes place in the book On Love, where he analyses the concept of love and identifies the disinterested love of beauty as a central species. He defends the existence of an intelligible type of beauty, the most important instance of which is the beauty of virtuous character, citing both linguistic evidence and empirical facts about ordinary human responses to moral exemplars, such as religious figures living in the past. Epistemic access to the character of such figures is provided by oral and written narratives, which naturally evoke a rationally justified emotional reaction of love. The empirical focus of al-Ghazālī's discussion raises interesting questions about the empirical adequacy of his claims about human responses to moral excellence, which invite a more nuanced view of his concept of human nature and of the possibility of moral error. Al-Ghazālī's ultimate aim in this discussion is to establish that the virtues we love in human beings are realised in God in their most perfect form and that God is therefore the most deserving object of a love responsive to beauty.
