Introduction: to the Special Issue Ethics and Aesthetics - issues at their intersection

We present the structure and guiding principles of this Special Issue, with a brief description
of the participants’ contributions and the relations holding between them. The intersection
between aesthetics and ethics as a field of philosophical enquiry is presented under the guise
of a ‘layer cake’: at the top layer we find the most general metaphysical and epistemological
issues concerning the nature of value, aesthetic and ethical; the middle layer encompasses
several normative issues about the interactions of aesthetic, moral and cognitive values
in art; finally at the bottom layer we introduce issues of a more restricted focus, like the
aesthetic peculiarity of political songs and the ethics of artistic appropriation.