Anthony Savile

How are the beautiful and the good related? A popular answer to this ancient question takes it that to call something beautiful is just to bring it under the most general term of favourable aesthetic assessment and that since the good is in general what we reflectively want then, crudely put, the beautiful is the good's aesthetic dimension. Following this train of thought, we avoid the suggestion that there is any intimate connection between the beautiful and some more narrowly conceived moral or ethical good, since that is, again crudely put, restricted to the good's practical dimension, a dimension supposedly alien to aesthetic concerns