Humans found themselves in this world alone in the face of harsh nature, and in order

to control it and maintain survival, they turned to hunting and the making of some primitive
tools that they developed over time. They also practiced various rituals. Nowadays, they can
be found in the form of drawings and inscriptions in caves; this was the first appearance of
art. Even if the primitive human's goal of practicing this latter was to appease nature and gain
strength by hunting, the art was thus ritually linked to that benefit. After that, art developed
with the evolution of humans, and the thorny relationship between it and ethics emerged into
existence, especially in some of the great human civilizations, such as Mesopotamia, ancient
Egypt, and the ancient Chinese civilisation. In these ancient Eastern civilizations, art reached
its peak, both in terms of aesthetics and in terms of the ability of artists to express their lives
at the time. It is also worth noting that art was an absolute subordination of morals and
religion to the ancients of the East, which was reflected in the Babylonian and Egyptian
antiquities and sculptures and the famous books about ancient Chinese civilisation.

But the real beginning of the study of the relationship between beauty and morals was
in the Greek civilization, in which art reached the highest levels of sophistication and
development, as the Greeks were obligated to repeat Homer's Iliad in their various forums and
teach it to the young by educators and teachers. The Greek philosophers knew the extent of
the influence that art left on the souls of the recipients, so they subjected it to study and
criticism and surrounded it with a wide range of strict moral laws, especially in the stage of
maturity and completion in which the greatest Greek philosophers appeared, such as Socrates,
Plato, and Aristotle.

These philosophers studied arts prevalent in Greece and treated them from a formal
and objective point of view. Socrates called for the art of virtue, while Plato stripped art and
reached an extreme level in subjecting artists to strict moral rules that they were forced to
abide by, and expelled from his city every artwork that negatively affected the sublime moral
education of individuals, then Aristotle came to call for moderation and promised to prejudice
virtue during the practice of any of the arts, just as he was the most brilliant philosopher in his
criticism of poetry in form and content.

Art continued to be subject to the authority of morals in the late philosophical schools,
but it was not with the same force as the period of prosperity and maturity, and that
dependency remained present among the philosophers of the Middle Ages, but it was dyed
with a religious tint. Then the philosophers were divided into two groups: a section calling for
the separation of art and its complete independence from ethics, on the pretext that each of
them has its own field and is different from the other, and a section that supported the Greek
opinion, even if it came in a new form represented in Marxist realism and literary
commitment.

A third trend appeared coinciding with the two previous ones. Its owners reconciled
art and morals so that neither one followed the other. They also argued that there is room for
each of them in the universe without affecting art with morals, nor for morals to overwhelm
art and remove its beauty.

We previously knew that the subject of ethics is free human activities in terms of their
conformity to good or evil, as well as their relationship to duty and the ideal of lofty human
behaviour. As we knew that beauty intervenes in all the circumstances of our lives, humans
always resort to art as a means of expressing the highest ideas of their soul and their interests,
and the highest perceptions of people have been manifested since ancient times in the
products of their arts.

From that, we notice that morals and beauty are related to humans, their interests and
their behaviour. Consequently, we cannot overpower one over the other nor create enmity and
dissonance between them. The human conscience imposes on the artist a commitment, not to
prejudice the virtuous moral values.