 In the wake of a post-Kantian tradition that endorses art’s autonomy, many readers balk at Hume’s strong endorsement of the relevance moral judgment upon aesthetic evaluation (SOT, 283–84). Hume discusses the moral failing of several plays (SOT, 284) and of the Koran, considered as a literary “performance” (SOT, 267). How can Hume reconcile this position with his endorsement of Batteux’s influential thesis, in which the mechanical arts are distinguished from fine art by the fact that the latter exists only to provide pleasure? (“Of Tragedy” proceeds as if literature exists solely to provide the pleasure of the experience.) But there is also a side of Hume that refuses to distinguish between literature and other, “practical” writing. Every work of art is evaluated according to its distinctive purpose, with poetry alone singled out as having the purpose of “pleasing” the imagination (SOT, 277). Ultimately, there is very little art that Hume might treat as art-for-art’s-sake.