“I even believe aesthetics are like ethics. Something that is beautiful is ethical, and unethical things aren’t beautiful.”

Agnelli: The Rules of the Game, Vanity Fair (1991)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 14, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I even believe aesthetics are like ethics. Something that is beautiful is ethical, and unethical things aren’t beautifu…" by Gianni Agnelli?
Gianni Agnelli photo
Gianni Agnelli 5
Italian businessman 1921–2003

Related quotes

Miguel de Unamuno photo
Ludwig Wittgenstein photo

“Ethics and aesthetics are one.”

Source: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Asger Jorn photo
Ludwig Wittgenstein photo
Asger Jorn photo
Timothy Leary photo
Saul D. Alinsky photo

“The ninth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.”

Saul D. Alinsky (1909–1972) American community organizer and writer

Source: Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971), p. 35

Holden Karnofsky photo

“I generally believe in trying to be an ethical person by a wide variety of different ethical standards”

Holden Karnofsky (1981) American nonprofit executive

In "Staff members' personal donations for giving season 2016" https://blog.givewell.org/2016/12/09/staff-members-personal-donations-giving-season-2016/, December 2016
Context: Regarding (b) ["checking boxes I want to check for considering myself a personally moral/ethical person, which is related but not identical to trying for maximum expected positive impact on the world"]: every year, I want to give a significant amount to "charity" as conventionally construed, straightforwardly helping the less fortunate. I generally believe in trying to be an ethical person by a wide variety of different ethical standards (not all of which are consequentialist). And I wouldn't feel that I were meeting this standard if I were giving nothing (or a trivial amount) to known, outstanding opportunities to help the less fortunate, for purposes of saving as much money as possible for adversarial projects (such as political campaigns) and/or more speculative projects (such as work related to artificial intelligence). I think the best giving opportunities in this category are GiveWell's top charities, so I will be giving a portion of this year's donation there, following the recommended allocation.

Andrei Tarkovsky photo

“Art is realistic when it strives to express an ethical ideal. Realism is striving for truth, and truth is always beautiful.”

Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 113
Context: Art is realistic when it strives to express an ethical ideal. Realism is striving for truth, and truth is always beautiful. Here the aesthetic coincides with the ethical.

William James photo

“Pacifists ought to enter more deeply into the aesthetical and ethical point of view of their opponents.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

1900s, The Moral Equivalent of War (1906)
Context: Pacifists ought to enter more deeply into the aesthetical and ethical point of view of their opponents. … So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation. And as a rule they do fail. The duties, penalties, and sanctions pictured in the utopias they paint are all too weak and tame to touch the military-minded.

Related topics