Aesthetic is a useful term, but less so when used as one half of a binary. Using it tends to invoke a clear separation from the ethical, which is forced away, separate and distinct. Nor does Wayne Booth’s more accommodating scheme (‘aesthetic values are real’, but ‘aesthetic quality’ and ‘moral and ethical quality’ overlap) unknot the problem. In any realised practice—art, language, perhaps any concrete phenomenon that is also conceptual—the ‘aesthetic’ and ‘ethical’ are inescapably connected, each raising concerns ostensibly to do with the other, and impossible to separate meaningfully. The way much of philosophical aesthetics tends to formulate this is inadequate for exploring how aesthetics can constitute and carry a worldview. Noël Carroll, for instance, describes ‘moralism’ as positing ‘that sometimes a moral defect in an artwork can be an aesthetic flaw and that sometimes a moral virtue can be an aesthetic virtue’. The notion of ‘moral virtue[s]’ or ‘defect[s]’ radically conditions the kind of moral relevance a text might be considered to have. It suggests a preliminary conception of the morally good that fails to acknowledge the constitutive and experiential nature of what ‘aesthetic’ innovations might create. It also sets up a way of thinking that views ‘moral’ as substantive: not relational, or attitudinal, or atmospheric, or emergent, or experiential, or evoked. We’re in the realm of ‘thing’ language, as opposed to ways, modes, atmospheres.