You're in your car. A song comes on. The beat is undeniable. Your body responds before your brain does. Then you remember who made it. And suddenly the question arrives: can you still enjoy this? That tension is not weakness. It is one of the most serious questions in contemporary aesthetics. And it has a name. The debate over whether an artwork's moral properties are relevant to its aesthetic value sits at the center of modern criticism. Philosophers call the two main camps moralism and autonomism. Last lecture, we tracked how fame operates as a force multiplier. West's platform amplified both his art and his harm. Now the question shifts inward. The question is yours, IZ. When you know what a creator has done, what do you owe the work? What do you owe yourself? And what do you owe the communities that were hurt? These are not rhetorical questions. Philosophers have built entire frameworks to answer them. Autonomism holds that a work's aesthetic value is independent of its ethical value. Moral criteria simply do not belong in the room when you are judging art as art. The strongest version, radical autonomism, goes further. It says artworks cannot properly be judged in moral terms at all. Bringing ethics to bear on aesthetics is, in this view, a category error. Moderate autonomism is softer. It accepts that a work can be morally wicked yet aesthetically excellent, treating those as entirely separate domains. Think of it like judging a knife's sharpness without asking what it was used for. Moralism flips the logic. It argues that a work's moral merits and defects also count as aesthetic merits and defects. Radical moralism says every moral flaw is an aesthetic flaw, full stop. Moderate moralism, associated with philosopher Noël Carroll, is more precise. Sometimes a moral defect damages a work artistically. Sometimes it does not. It depends on the work and the context. Then there is ethicism, developed by Berys Gaut. Gaut's position is that ethical flaws in a work always diminish its artistic value, while ethical virtues enhance it. [emphasis] Always. That is the strongest moralist claim on the table. Now, here is where it gets practically urgent. Ethical critics argue that when a work's endorsement of a reprehensible attitude is so central to its content, it can undermine the work's own artistic aims. The moral failure becomes an aesthetic failure. For example, a piece of political propaganda built entirely on dehumanizing a group does not just offend. It fails on its own terms as art, because the distortion corrupts the work's internal logic. That is the interactionist position. Ethical and aesthetic properties sometimes interact. They are not always sealed off from each other. There is also the practical layer. Streaming, merchandise, ticket sales, and attention all translate into material support. Continued promotion of a severely harmful creator raises a real question: does consumption constitute endorsement? Scholars increasingly stress the social consequences of that choice. [short pause] But here is the counterintuitive part. Boycotts can sometimes amplify mythic power. Refusal generates publicity. The banned artist becomes the martyr. That dynamic does not make boycotts wrong. It makes them complicated. The key idea is that no single response is automatically correct. Contemporary scholarship offers a hybrid path. Acknowledge the autonomy of aesthetic appreciation and the legitimacy of ethical criticism simultaneously. Hold both. Educators describe this as teaching audiences to hold artistic admiration and moral concern in productive tension. That means you can recognize West's sonic architecture as genuinely innovative while refusing to minimize the harm his words caused. The takeaway, IZ, is this: build your own criteria. Ask whether the harmful worldview is incidental to the work or structural within it. Ask whether your consumption materially supports ongoing harm. And ask whether a reflective, critical mode of listening lets you benefit from the insight without absorbing the poison. That is not a compromise. That is precision.