On Schiller’s Aesthetic and Social Elevation of Moral Perception

Authors

  • Gerald Moshammer

Abstract

Many contemporary philosophical theories of morality operate according to crude logical examples. For instance: ‘setting a cat on fire is wrong’. Schille’s robbed man scenarios from his Kallias letters tell a subtler tale. In this paper, I claim that with the notion of moral beauty, Schiller substantially transcends contemporary philosophical approaches to moral perception by (i) leading the eye to the ‘how’, rather than only to the ‘what’ of an action, (ii) loosening the fixation on the immoral, yet becoming aware of the graceful among the ostensibly dutiful and (iii) realizing that the possibility of moral perception is ultimately interlocked with graceful expressions in social interactions.

Author Biography

Gerald Moshammer

Mahidol University International College, Thailand

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