ethics and aesthetics

"What triggered this?" a friend asked, when i sent her the previous blog-post via email.
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i'm so glad i have good friends who ask me good questions. What triggered it, indeed. Well, partly an encounter with someone whose view of art and faith i do not share; partly self-examination of my own attitudes towards literature and writing that endorses values i disagree with. But i've been thinking about these issues for a long time: art, freedom, responsibility, ethics, faith, and the relationship between all of these disparate elements. Heck, i even wrote a paper once on "The Ethics of J.M. Coetzee’s Meta-fictions of the Self", which i thought was awful when i'd first submitted it, but which, if i may say so myself, doesn't look quite so bad when i read it now, 7 years later ...
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Anyway, so yes. i've always been concerned about art, responsibility, freedom, ethics, faith. It's just that these questions are becoming more real now that i'm more involved in the literary community.
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For what it's worth, i hate -- i mean, really hate -- the idea that freedom can be had without taking responsibility for the consequences of that freedom. Wanting to have your cake and eat it too. i believe that may just possibly be one of my pet peeves -- situations where people want to have their cakes and eat them, too. Wanting to have a good thing without being willing to pay the cost. What freeloaders.
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