Thick and Perceptual Moral Beauty

Moral Beauty 1 Who Engages with Moral Beauty ?

Aristotle considered moral beauty to be the telos of the human virtues (Sachs, 2002). Displays of moral beauty have been shown to elicit the moral emotion of elevation and cause a desire to become a better person and to engage in prosocial behavior. Study 1 (N = 5,380) shows engagement with moral beauty is related to several psychological constructs relevant to moral education, and structural m...

Engagement with beauty: appreciating natural, artistic, and moral beauty.

The Engagement With Beauty Scale (EBS), designed from the aesthetics of I. Kant (1790/1987), G. W. F. Hegel (ca. 1835/1993), and T. Aquinas (ca. 1260/1947) and the psychological work of J. Haidt (J. Haidt & D. Keltner, 2004), measures engagement with natural, artistic, and moral beauty. In Studies 1 and 2, the authors describe scale construction, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor...

“Controlling Beauty” Perceptual Representation and Control of Geometric Shape Spaces

We consider the problem of representing geometric entities in a perceptual coordinate system. A geometric object (for instance a closed contour or a surface patch) described by a finite number of parameters is mapped onto an arbitrary collection of perceptual coordinates via a psychophysical experiment, resulting in a collection of marginal probability distributions. Viceversa, a set of percept...

Moral Explanations, Thick and Thin by Brendan Cline

Beauty in abstract paintings: perceptual contrast and statistical properties

In this study, we combined the behavioral and objective approach in the field of empirical aesthetics. First, we studied the perception of beauty by investigating shifts in evaluation on perceived beauty of abstract artworks (Experiment 1). Because the participants showed heterogeneous individual preferences for the paintings, we divided them into seven clusters for the test. The experiment rev...