ETHICS AND AESTHETICS – Ethics deals with what is good, bad, right or wrong in a moral sense whereas aesthetics (study of values in art or beauty) refers to – what is good, bad, right or wrong in art and what constitutes the beautiful and the non-beautiful in our lives. There can, of course, be some overlap between the two areas. For example, one can judge Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica from an artistic point of view, deciding whether it is beautiful or ugly, whether it constitutes good or bad art in terms of artistic technique. One can also discuss its moral import. In this painting, Picasso makes moral comments on the cruelty and immorality of war and the inhumanity of people towards one another.
Amoral – It refers to having no moral sense or being indifferent to right and wrong. Certain people who have had prefrontal lobotomies tend to act amorally after the operation (No sense of right and wrong) and few human beings, despite moral education have remained or become amoral. Such people are of certain criminal nature who can’t realize their crime and don’t have any remorse or regret for their misconduct. One such example of an amoral person is Gregory Powell, who along with Jimmy Lee Smith gratuitously killed a policeman in an onion field south of Bakersfield, California (Joseph Wambaugh’s The Onion Field). Another such example is Colin Pitchfork who raped and killed two young girls in England (The Blooding by Wambaugh).
Non-Moral – It refers to those objects that are beyond the question of morality altogether. For example, inanimate objects such as cars and guns are neither moral nor immoral. A person using the car or gun may use it immorally but the things themselves are non-moral.
