Aesthetics and Ethics

Do the ethical features of an artwork bear on its aesthetic value? This movie endorses misogyny, that song is a civil rights anthem, the clay constituting this statue was extracted with underpaid labor—are facts like these the proper bases for aesthetic evaluation? I argue that this debate has suffered from a false presupposition: that if the answer is “yes” (for at least some such ethical features), such considerations feature as pro tanto contributions to an artwork’s overall aesthetic value, i.e., as (...) merits or flaws which make something have more or less overall aesthetic value. As the case of ethically laden aesthetic evaluation makes clear, however, good aesthetic judgement is irreducibly multi-dimensional, e.g., “the movie has an engaging soundtrack, tasteful camera work, and takes a misogynistically purient perspective on its female lead.” Such a “non-summative” judgement refuses to reduce those various dimensions of aesthetic value to a single aggregate aesthetic evaluation, like “it’s a 6/10” or “it’s a pretty good movie!” I defend both the modest claim that such non-summative evaluations are not mistaken and the extremist claim that summative (i.e., unidimensional) aesthetic evaluation is defective by considering other domains of normative assessment in which summing seems inappropriate, notably including evaluations of people’s character. (shrink)

Against certain positivistic and neopositivistic strictures still rooted in our society, Agazzi argues that knowing the invisible is possible, not just in science, but also in metaphysics, in morals, in aesthetics, and in other areas, including, in a sense, religion. The book also examines many examples of such knowledge, surveying not only the great classics of philosophy, but various immortal masterpieces of art, music and literature. It is not just a treatise in epistemology, but a book of philosophy in the (...) most complete and traditional sense, for it discusses knowledge not only for its own sake, but also as a guide to culture, morality, happiness and to the sense of life. Thus, it also provides some important suggestions on how to face our time of crisis and an uncertain future. Despite Agazzi’s proverbial rigor and clarity, his project is so momentous and demanding that I discuss certain points which might deserve further explication and argumentation. (shrink)

This paper presents a Kantian aesthetic argument in defense of weak transhumanism, contending that human fragility, finitude, and imperfection are not shortcomings to be transcended but essential conditions of beauty and meaning. Against the backdrop of accelerating technological advancement—particularly developments in artificial intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, and radical enhancement—the paper challenges the assumptions of strong transhumanism, which seeks to overcome the limits of the human condition. Drawing on Immanuel Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment and the sublime, it argues that the value (...) of human life is not merely instrumental or functional, but aesthetic and intrinsic. Through a series of distinctions between moderate and radical enhancement, the paper defines weak transhumanism as an ethically cautious path that permits technological improvement of the human condition without severing humanity from its essential nature. By contrast, strong transhumanism risks collapsing the tension between aspiration and limitation, flattening the richness of lived experience into a sterile pursuit of digital perfection. If meaning arises from finitude—if the sublime is felt in the confrontation with mortality and uncertainty—then efforts to erase these conditions may undermine the very sources of value we seek to preserve. The Promethean gift of imperfection, far from a curse, is reimagined as a foundation for beauty and purpose. The paper concludes by calling for epistemic humility and restraint in guiding future technological development—urging us to enhance human life not by erasing its limits, but by honoring them. (shrink)

Ralph Ellison consistently relied on a small set of terms in order to guide his writing practice and his interpretation of literature, history, and society. Following Kenneth Burke, an acquaintance of Ellison, I call this his terministic screen. Perhaps the most important elements of Ellison’s terministic screen are consciousness–conscience and purpose–passion–perception. The first set of terms represents what he saw as our democratic obligations: the pursuit of a progressively clearer consciousness of democratic ideals and a more refined conscientiousness in pursuing (...) these ideals. The second set of terms provided a narrative framework for showing how consciousness and conscience are attained or evaded. This essay analyzes the intellectual history of these terms and how they function in Ellison’s essays and novels. Special attention is given to Ellison’s unfinished second novel. (shrink)

The blistering review, wherein the critic cruelly twists the knife to the applause of on-lookers, has fallen out of favour. But is there something to be said for this sort of cruelty? In this paper, I argue for a space for cruelty. In art, there is a sort of cruelty—that can be employed by artists and audiences as well as by critics—that is a pointed disregard for the feelings of the audience: a telling of deep or hard truth without coddling. (...) When, as often, this is invited by the criticised person, it is respectful towards them. Sometimes the cruelty we invite is callousness, but sometimes it is more: if an artist, for example, creates bad art, they give an insult, and this insult invites an insult in return—such as would be a review that twists the knife. Giving this insult, then, is at least prima facie the respectful response. (shrink)

This paper attempts to develop an ethico-aesthetic framework for enriching one's life and ethical outlook. Drawing primarily from Nietzsche, Foucault, and Heidegger, an argument is made that Heidegger's understanding of this issue was mistaken. The ontological crisis of modernity is not the overt influence of mathematics as a worldview over poetics and more traditionally aesthetic approaches. It is the rampant mis-and over-application of abstraction within one's view of the world while denying the material realities of life as we live it. (...) This runaway abstractive worldview leads to the misapplication of mathematics and other sciences which in turn facilitate the dehumanization of life and those within it. When we try to solve the real problems of our material human lives through overly abstractive means, then we arrive at inauthentic arguments that fuel popular disdain for philosophy as irrelevant and nothing more than the purview of the elite. The goal is a recalibration of the argument toward addressing the denial of materiality within Modernism. (shrink)

This paper proposes a unified account of aesthetic and ethical evaluation based on the notion of cognitive resonance. Building on a previously developed model of aesthetics as a relational phenomenon, aesthetic judgment is described as an emergent alignment between configurations of the world and the cognitive structure of the observer, rather than as a property of objects or a projection of subjective preference. The central claim of the paper is that the same functional structure applies to ethical evaluation. Through a (...) controlled conceptual translation, aesthetic terms such as beauty and taste are replaced with ethical counterparts such as goodness and moral approval, without altering the underlying resonance-based model. The result is a coherent account of ethics as a diagnostic, relational, and situated process, rather than a normative system grounded in universal principles or objective moral facts. Under this perspective, ethical judgments reflect degrees of coherence between possible actions and the cognitive–affective organization of agents embedded in specific contexts. Ethical pluralism and moral disagreement emerge as structural features of divergent patterns of resonance, rather than as failures of rationality or access to moral truth. By reframing ethics as cognitive resonance, the paper shows how several traditional problems in moral philosophy—such as the opposition between objectivism and subjectivism, the fact–value distinction, and the tension between relativism and normativity—are dissolved rather than solved. The proposed framework preserves the experiential force of ethical evaluation while relinquishing the demand for foundational guarantees, offering a descriptive and conceptually economical account of ethical life. (shrink)

Sherri Irvin (2025, 2017) argues that, in light of various relational aesthetic injustices, the practice of celebrating human bodily beauty should be replaced with a practice she calls aesthetic exploration. This new practice is an aesthetic one—it involves open-mindedly seeking out positive aesthetic experiences afforded by the qualities of human bodies in the here and now. But the practice of aesthetic exploration is also, I argue, a political one—or at least, it has political goals. This short response assesses how aesthetic (...) exploration fares at achieving its political aims. I argue that adopting the practice of aesthetic exploration will not necessarily address looks-based discrimination or unjust aesthetic relations. I also consider whether the practice of aesthetic exploration risks dehumanizing its subjects. Finally, I gesture towards another way of addressing aesthetic injustice that would allow us to continue celebrating a distinctively human form of bodily beauty. (shrink)

Advocates of interactionism in the ethical criticism of art argue that ethical value impacts aesthetic value. The debate is concerned with “the intrinsic question”: the question of whether ethical flaws/merits in artworks’ manifested attitudes affect their aesthetic value (Gaut 2007: 9). This paper argues that the assumption that artworks have intrinsic ethical value is problematic at least in regards to a significant subset of works: fictional artworks. I argue that, insofar as their ethical value emerges only from attitudes attributable to (...) actual agents, fictional artworks only have extrinsic ethical value. I show that what is at stake for interactionism is whether ethical judgements concerning artists’ attitudes in a context, rather than manifested attitudes, are ever aesthetically relevant. I conclude that, without buying into extreme actual intentionalism, a still controversial theory of interpretation that ties artworks’ meaning to actual artists, interactionism fails to show that ethical flaws/merits are aesthetic flaws/merits. (shrink)

This is a review of philosophical approaches to music and emotion for the forthcoming 3rd edition of the Oxford Handbook of Music and Emotion edited by Patrik Juslin. The chapter begins by outlining the distinctive ways that philosophers approach issues about music, including the ancient question of whether music has an ethical influence. It is argued that this ancient question requires that the connection between pure instrumental music and emotions is clarified. The chapter then reviews philosophical work on musical expressivity, (...) identifying four key concepts- arousal, resemblance, imagination, and metaphor- as core to current debates (with the imagination view currently dominant). It then turns to issues about emotion induction or arousal, explaining why formalists are sceptical about arousal before examining the mechanisms of expectation and emotional contagion. Finally, the chapter reviews some of the ways that philosophers have further developed issues about music and emotion by considering theories of extended cognition, musical virtues, and the way that music can promote social cohesion. The attached file is the author's preprint. (shrink)

In ‘Where Ethics and Aesthetics Meet: Titian’s Rape of Europa’ (2003), A.W. Eaton conducts an in-depth analysis of Titian’s Rape of Europa, presenting the painting as an example of a work that is ethically defective and whose ethical defect diminishes the work aesthetically. In this paper, I argue that while Eaton convincingly pinpoints an ethical defect in the work, she fails to show that it is thereby aesthetically defective. My argument revives what she calls the ‘Objection from Creepiness’ (OfC), which (...) appeals to the existence of ‘creeps’, for whom the ethical defect in a work does not block the prescribed response. I argue that Eaton’s dismissal of the objection is too quick, and that a reconsideration of the OfC shows it to be particularly powerful in cases where (1) creeps are the target audience of a work, and (2) the ethical defects of the work concern the erotic. (shrink)

True crime is an incredibly popular genre of entertainment that crosses many forms of media including books, movies, TV shows, and podcasts. Is there something morally wrong with true crime stories or the enjoyment of them, given their focus on the pain and suffering of real people? In this article, I consider a range of concerns that implicate both the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of the true crime genre, and outline parameters for both the ethical creation and consumption of true (...) crime. (shrink)

In this paper we examine the potential of writing and performing poetry to empower young people from marginalized backgrounds to participate in the political life of their communities. Our method combines philosophical analysis with the design and implementation of a poetry workshop in Coventry. Drawing on Cavell’s notion of ‘acknowledgement’, we begin with a philosophical account of the pedagogy that informed the workshop’s design. We then explore how this account informed implementation of the workshop. Finally, we present the results. To (...) unpack the significance of our findings, we examine two poems performed by young people at the project’s concluding event. On empirical and philosophical grounds, we argue that writing and performing poetry can play a role in political education, for it opens space for what we call ‘the acknowledgment of voice.’. (shrink)

Early in The Sovereignty of Good, Iris Murdoch tells us that G. E. Moore is “as it were the frame of the picture” (3). That is, the picture she is developing of the good. This remark sets up the expectation that we read Murdoch as a Moorean. To the extent that Murdoch proceeds to engage, less with Moore than with Plato of the Republic, developing the latter’s startling comparison of the good and the sun, and speaking unabashedly of the form (...) of the Good with a capital G, the impression does not dissipate. This is because, to both casual and professional readers of Plato, the form of the Good, if it is comprehensible at all, is often read as a dramatic exemplification of Moore’s absolute conception of goodness. And yet I doubt that Murdoch is a Moorean. If we take Murdoch’s engagement with Plato seriously, we find that she does not join Moore in conceiving of goodness as a simple, monadic value property which we apprehend when we apprehend good things. The key finding of Murdoch’s engagement with Plato is that goodness is what I will call “generic excellence”. To anticipate, goodness is the power that makes the essence of a given attribute ideal or exemplary and in this way normative for its instances. To the extent that our understanding of Sovereignty is impoverished without an understanding of the concept she regards as sovereign, this essay is part of a growing interpretive effort to bring Murdoch into contemporary discussions in value theory. It uncovers a distinctive conception of the good and a striking account of aesthetic and intellectual values in particular. (shrink)

This preprint presents the ontological–physical core of the Unified Field Theory (TCU), proposing a granular spacetime framework grounded on Racron and Raion primitives and a scalar lattice formalism. The work introduces a unified operator-based treatment of fundamental interactions, including Gravity Δ and holographic–geometric components, under explicit falsifiability criteria, case-limits, and epistemic guardrails. -/- The document is conceptual and test-driven in nature. It does not claim empirical confirmation, does not propose a theory of mind or consciousness, and does not advance normative (...) social or political prescriptions. All cross-domain references are strictly constrained to operator-level modeling within a physical–ontological framework. (shrink)

This paper addresses a question that has sparked heated debate while mostly flying under the philosophical radar: should people stop wearing the merchandise (‘merch’) of bands they do not listen to? I respond affirmatively. People should stop wearing merch of bands they do not listen to because (1) doing so can silence people who wear band merch to communicate their taste in music and (2) this silencing threatens the valuable role that wearing band merch plays in the aesthetic lives of (...) people who share a taste in music: promoting aesthetic community among them. As will emerge throughout the paper, this argument is relevant to the debate on silencing as well as the debate on the value of aesthetic community. (shrink)

Should we save bees or bears? Should you repair the sofa or buy a new one? Allow construction on the beachfront? These apparently technical decisions conceal a deeper truth: they are shaped by our aesthetic education. We prefer forests to swamps because we perceive them as more beautiful. In a society obsessed with the “aesthetic,” we have lost the tools for genuine aesthetic judgment. In this journey —from the garden to the bedroom, passing through the threshold, the living room, the (...) kitchen, and the bathroom— Raquel Cascales reveals how we shape the world through our everyday decisions. Guided by the thought of Yuriko Saito, we discover that all reality has an aesthetic dimension: the tone of a voice, the gesture of opening a door, or the arrangement of a hospital room. The way things appear to us is never neutral. It influences us, affects us, invites us in, or pushes us away. Against the reduction of aesthetics to mere cosmetics, this book defends an embodied understanding of aesthetics, in which repairing a chair, taking out the trash, or caring for a pet become aesthetic ways of shaping and inhabiting the world. (shrink)

Ethical Criticism is the practice of pointing towards a flaw in the ethical content or character of an artwork as a reason why this artwork is aesthetically faulty in some respect. This paper develops novel account of the mechanism by which this critical practice works. In contrast to the standard approach, this does not involve positing an interaction between the intrinsic ethical value and aesthetic value of an artwork. The argument runs as follows. Narrative artworks are sometimes criticizable on the (...) grounds that they make inaccurate presuppositions about the actual facts. There are ethical facts, at least in a minimal sense. Therefore, artworks are sometimes criticizable on the grounds that they make mistaken presuppositions about the ethical facts. I argue that this Factual Criticism approach gives a satisfactory diagnosis of the examples that initially motivate the philosophical debate about ethics and aesthetics. (shrink)

This paper develops the aesthetics of authority as an independent normative framework for evaluating power. Moving beyond conventional reliance on legality and morality, the paper argues that authority must also be judged by its visual and emotional imprints on human life. Through examples from war, governance, environmental stewardship, economic organization, and social hierarchy, the paper shows that power manifests in aesthetic forms that shape how nations perceive dignity, order, and degradation. It introduces key distinctions—such as the static versus kinetic aesthetics (...) of military power and the notion of optical oppression—to demonstrate how institutions and practices generate beauty or ugliness in public life. The analysis contends that aesthetic judgment possesses a degree of objectivity, particularly in the near-universal revulsion toward scenes of suffering and destruction, and that such judgment can condemn actions even when they are legally or morally justified. By reframing authority as an aesthetic phenomenon visible in everyday environments and political conduct, the paper proposes that aesthetic responsibility is not secondary to governance but integral to it. (shrink)

As Big-Tech gains more control over human appetites and aversions (which Hobbes notoriously reduced humanity to), it is crucial to understand technology’s limitations. Why it cannot do the most important thing, upon which the prudence to balance autonomy with necessity rests: distinguish believing from knowing. This is an ‘ethical’ deficiency, revealed in reasons proposed here why AI can’t possibly make art (replaced now mostly by cultural artefact-making, which AI will excel at). Because aesthetics is about knowing, not perceiving (as Kant (...) prescribed), such reasoning matters to human survival. It has deteriorated in modern mythology under the mechanistic worldview that Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and others of the failed enlightenment project advanced to control Nature. Now driven by an avaricious political and technocratic elite advancing posthuman (anti-humanist) ideology, ‘mechanism’ underwrites excesses leading humanity toward self-destruction via militarism, dehumanisation, and ecological devastation. To control it, contrasting nature's teleological "mechanism" with humanity's ‘telos’, I propose embracing an ontological humanist perspective that is rooted in the Principle of Art, ancient mythology, and Aristotelian and Schellingian inspired complexity science. This shows mechanism and teleology are two different species of ‘acts’; and that having a “free relation” with both Nature and technology requires promoting humanity’s ahistorical ‘being’ via genuine art-making. (shrink)

本稿は対象・意味・真理を出発点とする従来理論を反転し、操作構造から評価および対象生成を導く理論を提示する。操作が複数の生成経路を持つ場合、応答の経路依存的差異の可能性が構造的に開かれる。再同定構造のも とではこの差異は同一結果に対応する生成経路集合の内部に集中する。本稿は、この差異集中により応答を結果の性質として定義できなくなることを示し、その差異の帰属決定構造を評価として定式化する。評価は応答操作 が生成経路から独立して結果集合から値集合への写像として定義できる場合に成立する。さらに評価が入力記述の精密化に対して安定する場合、同一決定値を共有する記述集合が同値類を形成し、この評価同値類が対象とし て成立する。以上により本稿は操作→差異→評価→対象という生成構造を示し、評価構造による対象生成の一般理論を与える。.

I argue in this paper that there are comic advantages to moral virtue. Namely, it aids and does not hinder one’s ability to make reliable comic judgments. This is so for two reasons. First, contrary to the claims of certain theorists, there is no reason why we should expect moral virtue to systematically diminish one’s ability to be a reliable comic judge. Secondly, moral virtue serves as an important corrective to prevent our sense of humour from being distorted by self-deception (...) and injustice. I argue for this claim independently of the truth of moralism or immoralism and it remains plausible even on subjectivist or relativist views of humour. (shrink)

In a letter to Czerny about teaching his nephew to play the fortepiano, Beethoven indicates that mistakes on notes are ‘minor mistakes.’ At the same time, problems like ignoring dynamic marks are ‘much more serious’ (Gerig 2007: 95). What could ground his insistence on following the dynamic marks on the score? The normativity of the score-following rule as an aesthetic rule is at stake here. In this paper, I raise concerns about the Practice-Based view, which, as I shall argue, grounds (...) the score-following rule in the same way as the rules of chess are grounded. As an alternative approach, I propose that the Genuine Performing Experience grounds the normativity of the score-following rule. My proposal not only offers a novel explanation of the normativity of the rule but also explains the meaningfulness of score compliance in classical music performance by highlighting its unique significance among other human practices. (shrink)

Images do more than represent the world; they help create it—guiding aesthetic expectations, influencing behavior, and shaping the material design of landscapes. Drawing on Heidegger, post-phenomenology, and environmental ethics, this paper examines photography as a mediating force that co-authors our experience of nature. In the age of social media, this dynamic intensifies: personal identity becomes entwined with environmental experience within hybrid spaces that blur digital and physical boundaries, merging self-expression with place-making. Tracing this shift from early conservation photography to contemporary (...) image economies, this paper advances a hermeneutic analysis of photographic world-building and calls for an ethic grounded in ecological responsibility and poetic dwelling—one that recognizes our active role in shaping environments and embraces the co-creative entanglement of self, image, and world. (shrink)

Aesthetic blight is persistently aversive aesthetic experience to which someone has been made systematically vulnerable by virtue of their identity, embodiment, or disempowered social position. Aesthetic blight undermines well-being and signals societal disregard, so justice requires working to eliminate it. An obvious solution is to clear up whatever stimuli are causing the aversive experience. But this strategy has its limits: it is not sensitive to variability in responses to stimuli, often produces an aesthetically bland environment, and generates further injustice when (...) human bodies and cultural products are among the stimuli perceived as aversive. A closer look reveals that aesthetic blight is not just a matter of aversive stimuli. It involves restrictions on aesthetic agency, conceived as taking two forms: agency to act on the world in response to our aesthetic evaluations (e.g., removing an aversive stimulus) and agency to act on our system of aesthetic evaluations to transform our responses—where the latter involves conceiving aversiveness not as a fixed quality of things, but as a potentially malleable quality of experience. By restoring people’s agency both to create valuable aesthetic environments and to transform their aversive responses in some circumstances, we can alleviate aesthetic blight without producing further injustice. (shrink)

While much has been said about what ought to be done about the statues and monuments of racist, colonial, and oppressive figures, a significantly undertheorised aspect of the debate is the aesthetics of commemorations. I believe that this philosophical oversight is rather unfortunate. I contend that taking the aesthetic value of commemorations seriously can help us a) better understand how and the extent to which objectionable commemorations are objectionable, b) properly formulate responses to aesthetic defences of objectionable commemorations, and c) (...) help us explore aesthetic solutions—for example, artistic interventions as counterspeech—to objectionable commemorations. Here, I propose that the aesthetic value of objectionable commemorations can amplify the force of the objectionable messages conveyed, and the moral disvalue of objectionable commemorations can hinder our appreciation of their aesthetic value. These two considerations shall help us answer the practical question of what to do about objectionable commemorations of apparently good aesthetic value. Both, I shall argue, give us further reason to remove, replace, recontextualise, or even vandalise objectionable commemorations. Sometimes we need to save the art from its own immorality to best respect its aesthetic value. (shrink)

Foreword to the Traditional Chinese translation of Erich Hatala Matthes's Drawing the Line: What to Do with the Work of Immoral Artists from Museums to the Movies, published as 《大師失格：如何在人品與作品之間劃出界線？》(2025). -/- Somewhat based on my own "The Art of Immoral Artists" (2024).

We care about whether the people around us can take a joke. And this care has a moral tinge to it: we're more likely to trust good-humoured people, and are prone to accusing humourless people of being ‘sanctimonious buzzkills’ who need to ‘get over themselves’. But are these moralized reactions justified? And what, if anything, justifies them? This paper discusses the moral value of humour in terms of its connection to mutual recognition: by engaging humourlessly with one another, we are (...) afforded a quick and dirty way to share perspectives in the way that relationships of mutual recognition often require. (shrink)

In this paper I hope to show how buck-passing theories of ethics can be applied to aesthetics in the hopes of reunifying aesthetics and ethics, and for reviving medieval and classical theories of beauty. To do so, I will briefly survey the buck-passing metaethical account (as developed by Scanlon and Parfit), show how it might be used to construct a general definition of beauty, and illustrate how this definition (and its implications) capture the core elements of Aquinas and Augustine’s conceptions (...) of beauty. The overall goal of the paper is that the “reasons” language buck-passing accounts employ to refer to fundamental ethical truths provides, at the very least, a neat and coherent way for discussing the normativity of aesthetic value. (shrink)

Internal coherence is of great importance for how we think about appreciating objects of aesthetic worth. A disagreement between what we judge to be worthy and what we affectively favor can prevent us from properly grasping its value. However, it is also assumed in the aesthetic domain that our taste changes over time, jeopardising such coherence constraint. These changes can lead to a mismatch between new aesthetic judgments and old aesthetic preferences. This chapter explores a number of issues that emerge (...) from this tension. Using Taylor Swift’s re-recording as a case study, I will explore the relation between fan loyalty and personal authenticity, as well as the role of biographical taste in the reception of these newly recorded albums among Swift’s long-time fanbase. (shrink)

In the last 20 years, a large number of studies have investigated judgments of the identity of various objects (e.g., persons, material objects, institutions) over time. One influential strand of research has found that identity judgments are shaped by normative considerations. People tend to believe that moral improvement is more compatible with the continuity of identity of a person than moral deterioration, suggesting that persons are taken to be essentially morally good. This asymmetry is often referred to as the “Phineas (...) Gage effect”. However, normativity extends beyond morality. In particular, it is unknown whether changes in aesthetic value have a similar impact on identity judgments. We investigate whether works of art would be analogously seen as essentially aesthetically valuable. We ran four studies (N = 1264) to explore whether aesthetic considerations have a similar influence on judgments of the identity of artworks. We presented the participants with stories describing either a painting or a musical work which undergoes changes and becomes either more or less aesthetically valuable. Overall, we found only mixed evidence for the Phineas Gage effect in relation to the aesthetic value of artworks. Other factors, such as moral value, seem to have a bigger impact on judgments of persistence. (shrink)

Peirce’s Relationship Towards Aesthetics (Summary): -/- In this paper, I will examine Peirce’s relationship towards aesthetics. The topic is significant not only for his concept of aesthetics, but also for illuminating the general character of his thought. Specifically, I will focus on Peirce’s understanding of the problem of immediacy, his view of aesthetics as the science of ideals, and the importance of the phenomenological concept of Firstness in relation to his concept of aesthetics and its subject matter.

El proyecto de tesis plantea el problema metafilosófico del desacuerdo en la disciplina estética desde una perspectiva pluralista fundamentada en el pluralismo orientativo de Nicholas Rescher. Nuestra empresa, lejos de considerar los desacuerdos como fallas doctrinarias, los interpreta como expresiones legítimas de la diversidad axiológica que es congénita al ámbito de la filosofía y, en consecuencia, a la estética. Por medio de un enfoque que armoniza una dimensión metaestética y una síntesis heurística en particular, la investigación aproxima un sistema de (...) metodologías que concierta y propone la visualización tanto tensiones como de debates de la filosofía del arte. El trabajo identifica las prioridades axiológicas que subyacen a las distintas posturas y contextualiza sus diferencias sin reducir la pluralidad ingénita de sus análisis. La metaestética, entendida como una extensión de la metafilosofía, complementa este enfoque al reflexionar sobre los fundamentos de las teorías estéticas, dotándolas de criterios evaluativos que guían la mediación en desacuerdos profundos. La metodología se aplica a debates específicos, como las tensiones entre subjetivismo y objetivismo o realismo e irrealismo, iluminando los valores estructurales de cada teoría y la situación de conflicto. En última instancia, esta tesis contribuye a consolidar la estética como una disciplina filosófica comprometida con la racionalidad y el progreso cognitivo, mostrando que los desacuerdos no son obstáculos, sino oportunidades para enriquecer nuestra comprensión de la diversidad de soluciones filosófica. (shrink)

This paper disputes the generalised definition of ‘aesthetic practice’ which leads deconstructive postmodern ‘aestheticians’ to equate aesthetic activities (eg., gardening, hair-braiding) with art-making. Reviving an understanding of Art’s single unifying Principle is a necessary precondition for restoring the meaning of an artistic practice. I describe its ancient origins, its disappearance in modernity, and reconstruct its defining criteria, showing why art cannot be confused with just any ‘cultural practice’ whereby one’s experience of the ‘general aesthetic’ can by merely mimicking Nature elicit (...) familiar empathic responses reflectively. I argue very little real art is being made today, and AI is perfectly suited to making what has replaced it: ‘cultural artefact’. In reconstructing this Principle, I show why artistic practice cannot be predicated merely upon theories of beauty/pleasure; but rather on what Aristotle deemed the ‘higher pleasure’ of making Reason (merging beauty with truth, and freedom with necessity). This overcomes Kant’s reflective aesthetic paradigm that engendered the misguided ‘experientialism’ dominating modern/postmodern “art” - undergirding an ‘artworld’ of mainly anti-Art (in what Bernard Stiegler calls the ‘catastrophe’ of modern aesthetic experience driven by the rise of ‘technicism’). A process for applying the Principle’s criteria is briefly outlined, demonstrating how to distinguish a ‘phenomenological experience’ from ‘ordinary experience’, and thus a genuinely poetic discourse from any other form of speculative discourse. Uncovering the Principle’s origins in Aristotle’s natural science (and his discernment of ‘making’ from ‘acting’ in technê), separating normative from theoretical aesthetics, and unveiling art’s ‘objective’ meaningfulness in any artwork’s phenomenology, reaffirms why art’s relation to the Person (its ‘anthropological phenomenology’) is of primary concern to aesthetes. I conclude with how the purpose of all inquiry into aesthetics is made more meaningful by reviving the Principle of Art, and why this essentially renders theoretical aesthetics redundant. (shrink)

Aesthetic communities offer us opportunities for collective, communal, and value-disclosing shared aesthetic experiences. This paper develops an account of shared aesthetic experiences andprovides an answer to the question of their significance: when they occur within aesthetic communities, their distinctive phenomenology is a powerful resource for creating a sense that our lives are aesthetically meaningful.

To what extent, and on what grounds, can we ethically evaluate art from a generative context that is at some significant distance from our present reception context—at enough distance, at least, so that the two contexts differ, in important ways, in aspects of their moral outlooks? This paper has four aims. The modest task of the paper is to show that this question is much more difficult than has been recognised. The somewhat more ambitious goal is a methodological intervention: it (...) is to highlight the need for interdisciplinary research that illuminates the socio-historical specificities of remote generative contexts in a way that allows us to see the relevant ways in which the moral outlooks overlap with ours (or do not). In relation, the third aim of the paper is to argue, with reference to Bernard Williams’s ‘relativism of distance’, that there are some cases in which the moral outlooks of a work’s generative and reception contexts differ so significantly that the warrant for our moral judgments of remote artworks is attenuated—if it exists at all. Finally, we try to demonstrate how the sort of interdisciplinary collaboration we’re advocating might inform our moral judgments of art—more specifically, in a way that invites a degree of quietude or uncertainty about remote artworks that are deeply morally troubling in our present reception context. We do this with reference to the paintings of Titian. (shrink)

Why is destroying heritage pro tanto wrong? Why does heritage destruction require justification, unlike the destruction of rubbish? The property rights view answers: heritage belongs to people, communities and cultures. The reverence view answers: we are obliged to respect things with non-instrumental value. The moral rights view answers: our predecessors, contemporaries and successors have rights to have their cherishings respected and cultural and epistemic goods protected. The moral harm view answers: destroying heritage causes morally significant harm. I argue that these (...) views all fail to account for the basic obligation to not destroy heritage. I propose that heritage essentially gives us experiences of connections to historically significant things, and these experiences are aesthetically valuable and irreplaceable. Destroying heritage is pro tanto wrong because it leads to the premature and irreversible extinction of these precious and vulnerable experiences. My account makes sense of genuineness as an aesthetic property, vindicates the idea of purely aesthetic obligations, and entails that heritage can be of the present and future, not only the past. (shrink)

Attempting to make clear different theories of cultural ownership, cultural property scholars have divided dominant views into two categories: cultural nationalism and cultural internationalism. Although not discussed in the relevant literature, I claim it is useful to understand these two categories as comprised of the ethical views of deontology and consequentialism. I claim cultural internationalists believe they have good independent reasons against returning problematic cultural heritage like the Parthenon marbles. However, I will demonstrate their arguments are based on consequentialist ethics, (...) and there are just as many consequentialist reasons to return the marbles as there are for them to remain in the British Museum, undermining cultural internationalist arguments against their return. (shrink)

Stravinsky considered himself a maker, a Homo faber, an artisan of the past. He confessed that he liked to compose music more than music itself, and argued that expression was not an immanent character of music. With this paper, I intend to discuss Stravinsky’s musical aesthetics (the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures given right after the outbreak of WWII –Poétique musicale), depicting and criticising his notion of expression and his view of the musician as mere “executant”. I will also point out (...) some biographical details (the controversial premiere of Le Sacre du printemps and Stravinsky’s antisemitism) while criticising Adorno’s harsh critique of Stravinsky’s music. -/- . (shrink)

Somaesthetics of discomfort provides tools for instrumentally usurping normativity that imposes ideologies of domination upon bodies. I argue that somaesthetics pro- vides an underutilized set of tools for interrogating alienation. By developing somaes- thetics with specific regard for feelings of discomfort that accompany alienation and misfitting, inquiry becomes rooted in material experiences of abjection, oppression, and exclusion, which have too often been silenced or homogenized through overly generalized discourse.

Although the fictional domain exhibits a prima facie freedom from real-world moral constraints, certain fictive imaginings seem to deserve moral criticism. Capturing both intuitions, this paper argues for double-standard moralism, the view that fictive imaginings are subject to different moral standards than their real-world counterparts. I show how no account has, thus far, offered compelling reasons to warrant the moral appropriateness of this discrepancy. I maintain that the normative discontinuity between fiction and the actual world is moderate, as opposed to (...) one that leaves fictive engagements wholly exempt from moral evaluations. I propose a way of addressing the gamer’s dilemma that is compatible with a moderate kind of discontinuity. Finally, I contend that the audience is justified in adopting deviant moral attitudes in fictional situations because their consequences largely differ from those that analogous real-world events would have. (shrink)

Philosophers have rightly condemned lookism—that is, discrimination in favor of attractive people or against unattractive people—in education, the justice system, the workplace and elsewhere. Surprisingly, however, the almost universal preference for attractive romantic and sexual partners has rarely received serious ethical scrutiny. On its face, it’s unclear whether this is a form of discrimination we should reject or tolerate. I consider arguments for both views. On the one hand, a strong case can be made that preferring attractive partners is bad. (...) The idea is that choosing partners based on looks seems essentially similar to other objectionable forms of discrimination. (In particular, the preference for attractive partners is arguably both unfair and harmful to a significant degree.) One can try to resist this conclusion in several ways. I consider three possible replies. The first has to do with the possibility of controlling our partner preferences. The second pertains to attractiveness and “good genes”. The last attempts to link certain aspects of attractiveness to a prospective partner’s personality and values. I argue that the first two replies fail conclusively, while the third only amounts to a limited defense of a particular kind of attractiveness preference. So the idea that we should often avoid preferring attractive partners is compelling. (shrink)

What responsibilities do audiences have in engaging with artworks? Certain audience responses seem quite clear: for example, audiences should not vandalize or destroy artworks; they should not disrupt performances. This paper examines other kinds of resisting responses that audiences sometimes engage in, including petitioning the artist to change their works, altering copies of artworks, and creating new artworks in another artist’s fictional world. I argue for five claims: (1) while these actions can sometimes infringe on the rights of artists, the (...) rights of artists are not absolute; (2) the fact that such actions are based on mistaken interpretations of the artworks has no normative weight; (3) there can be reason to object to additions and alterations whose conception of the artwork is morally worse than the original (and so, there can be reason to support additions and alterations whose conception is morally better); (4) petitioning raises special moral problems; and, most important, (5) some of these actions are valuable because they involve creative and aesthetic activity. Those acts of audience resistance that are creative, morally improve on the original work, and that minimize the infringement of the artists’ rights are good, and should be encouraged. (shrink)

It is a noteworthy disanalogy between contemporary ethics and aesthetics that the fitting-attitude account of value, so prominent in contemporary ethics, sees comparatively little play in aesthetics. The aim of this paper is to articulate what a systematic fitting-attitude-style framework for understanding aesthetic value might look like. In the bulk of the paper, I sketch possible fitting-attitude-style accounts of three central aesthetic values – the beautiful, the sublime, and the powerful – so that the general form of the framework come (...) through. (shrink)

The primary aim of this chapter is to outline the consensuses that have emerged in recent philosophical works tackling normative questions about responding to immoral artist’s art. While disagreement amongst philosophers is unavoidable, there is actually much agreement on the ethics of media consumption. How should we evaluate immoral artist’s art? Philosophers generally agree that we should not always separate the artist from the art. How should we engage with immoral artist’s art? Philosophers generally agree that we should not always (...) reflexively turn away from them. In turn, these responses reveal that moral value is not autonomous from aesthetic value, and neither dominates the other. The secondary aim of this chapter is to explore the ramifications of this revelation. I argue that, in addition to an ethics of media consumption, we need an aesthetics of media consumption that is fundamentally social rather than solitary. (shrink)

This chapter offers an overview of issues posed by the problem of immoral artists, artists who in word or deed violate commonly held moral principles. I briefly consider the question of whether the immorality of an artist can render their work aesthetically worse (making connections to chapters in the Theory section of the handbook), and then turn to questions about what the audience should do and feel in response to knowledge of these moral failings. I discuss questions such as whether (...) audiences have reason not to purchase or consume work by these artists, whether their shows and exhibitions should be canceled, and how fans might grapple with the emotional turmoil they feel when artists whom they love act or speak in ways that are morally condemnable. (shrink)

This article explores how the notion ofordinary aestheticscan stem, as well as the one ofordinary ethics, from thatrevolution of the ordinarystarted by Wittgenstein and further developed by philosophers like Cavell and Diamond. The idea ofordinary ethicsemphasizes the importance of everyday life and the particular details of our experiences. This concept can be extended to aesthetics, forming the basis of a modality of aesthetic appreciation that recognize values and importance in the details and nuances of everyday experience. One example of suchordinary (...) aestheticscan be found in thehaikupoetry of Bashō. Bashō’s poetry often focuses on the ordinary and mundane aspects of life, such as the changing of seasons, the sound of rain, or the sight of a bird in flight, but also on that lower world made of insects, rotten foliage, and excrements. Bashō conveys in poetry the core ofZenphilosophy, emphasizing the interconnectedness of all things and the value of living in the present moment. This approach to aesthetics offers an alternative to more traditional modes of aesthetic appreciation, which tend to prioritize grandeur, spectacle, and formal perfection. Ultimately, the concept of ordinary aesthetics invites us to find the intrinsic importance in the simple things that surround us and to cultivate a deeper appreciation for the richness of our everyday lives. (shrink)

In this chapter, we identify and present predominant debates at the intersection of ethics and imagination. We begin by examining issues on whether our imagination can be constrained by ethical considerations, such as the moral evaluation of imagination, the potential for morality’s constraining our imaginative abilities, and the possibility of moral norms’ governing our imaginings. Then, we present accounts that posit imagination’s integral role in cultivating ethical lives, both through engagements with narrative artworks and in reality. Our final topic of (...) consideration focuses on the possibility of imagination constituting or constructing new ethical or political frameworks. (shrink)