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)

In this introduction, I explain the notion of higher-order evidence and explore its bearing on aesthetic judgement. I start by illustrating how reflection on cases involving higher-order evidence engages with well-established concerns in aesthetics—specifically, how it might reveal tensions within and between widely recognized aesthetic ideals governing aesthetic judgement. Next, I show how attention to higher-order evidence in relation to aesthetic judgement might expose limitations or assumptions of theories in epistemology, where the nature and significance of higher-order evidence with respect (...) to belief is the focus of much recent attention. The aim is not to resolve the issues but to demonstrate the significance of higher-order evidence in aesthetics and, in doing so, encourage work on the topic in and across aesthetics and epistemology. (shrink)

What does the aesthetic ask of us? What claims do the aesthetic features of the objects and events in our environment make on us? My answer in this paper is: that depends. Aesthetic reasons can only justify feelings – they cannot demand them. A corollary of this is that there are no aesthetic obligations to feel, only permissions. However, I argue, aesthetic reasons can demand actions – they do not merely justify them. A corollary of this is that there are (...) aesthetic obligations to act, not only permissions. So, I conclude, the aesthetic asks little of us as patients and much of as agents. (shrink)

What is aesthetic appreciation? In this paper, I approach this question in an indirection fashion. First, I introduce the Kantian notion of moral worthy action and an influential analysis of it. Next, I generalise that analysis from the moral to the aesthetic domain, and from actions to affects. Aesthetic appreciation, I suggest, consists in an aesthetically worthy affective response. After unpacking the proposal, I show that it has non-trivial implications while cohering with a number of existing insights concerning the nature (...) of appreciation and the constraints to which it is subject. In closing, I note some limitations on the analogy between aesthetic appreciation and morally worthy action. (shrink)

Those who have views about the relation between aesthetic and ethical value often also have views about the nature of art criticism. Yet no one has paid much attention to the compatibility of views in one debate with views in the other. This is worrying in light of a tension between two popular kinds of view: namely, between critical pluralism and any view in the art and ethics debate that presupposes an invariant relation between aesthetic value and ethical value. Specifically, (...) the tension with invariance arises insofar as critical pluralism accommodates the aesthetic value of interpretive richness, including the aesthetic value of ethically conflicted interpretive richness. Given this tension, a shift of focus is needed in the art and ethics debate; from specifying the criteria for the aesthetic relevance of a work's ethical qualities to defending the fundamental nature of the aesthetic-ethical value relation. (shrink)

This article aims to advance our understanding of the interaction between moral and artistic value by asking what it means that an artwork's moral virtue or defect is an artistic virtue or defect and how we can prove or disprove such a claim. I approach these questions first by distinguishing between intrinsic and contextual value interactions and then by examining two strategies commonly used to establish claims about contextual value interaction: (1) appealing to the counterfactual dependence of the work's artistic (...) value on its moral virtue or defect and (2) arguing that the work is artistically valuable (or defective) and morally valuable (or defective) for the same reasons. I argue that these strategies fail. I then propose new directions for research on the interaction between moral and artistic value. (shrink)

The bulk of the literature on the relationship between art and morality is principally concerned with an aesthetic question: Do moral flaws with works of art constitute aesthetic flaws?1 Much less attention has been paid to the ways in which artworks can be morally flawed. There are at least three promising contenders that concern aesthetic education: Artworks can be morally flawed by endorsing immorality, corrupting audiences, and encouraging responses that are bad to have. When it comes to works of fiction, (...) the third suggestion requires what Allan Hazlett calls response moralism—the position that audience reactions to artworks can be morally bad.2 Here, I will put aside issues of aesthetic.. (shrink)

In recent years, a number of philosophers have suggested that the aesthetic value sometimes depends on moral value. In this paper, I motivate and defend the inverse position: the view that aesthetic value sometimes partially grounds moral value. I appeal to Grand Budapest Hotel and The Lovely Bones to show that maudlin treatments of morally serious subject matter are sometimes disrespectful, in part because they are maudlin; I appeal to Madame Bovary to show that lyrical treatments of morally serious subject (...) matter are compassionate, in part because they are lyrical. I go on to clarify that aesthetic value and descriptive facts about the subject matter of an artwork jointly ground its moral value, and I conclude by considering and rejecting a number of potential objections to the aestheticist thesis. (shrink)

We defend a fitting-attitude theory of the funny against a set of potential objections. Ultimately, we endorse a version of FA theory that treats reasons for amusement as non-compelling, metaphysically non-conditional, and alterable by social features of the joke telling context. We find that this version of FA theory is well-suited to accommodate our ordinary practices of telling and being amused by jokes, and helpfully bears on the related faultless disagreement dispute.

This article advances and defends three claims: that the proper ethical criticism of environmental art requires a production-oriented approach-an approach that appraises the ethical merits or flaws of the work in terms of how the artwork is created as well as the consequences of its creation; that, depending on contextual factors, ethical flaws in environmental artworks may, but do not necessarily, constitute aesthetic flaws in those works; that, because environmental artworks appropriate part of the environment as an aspect of their (...) identity, an aesthetic flaw in an environmental artwork necessarily also creates aesthetic disvalue in the environment-disvalue that exists in virtue of the creation of the artwork. I conclude with one further, more speculative claim, which deserves further investigation: the aesthetic flaws of an environmental artwork, which result in aesthetic flaws in the natural environment itself, are always ethical flaws of the artwork. This seems to make environmental art distinctive; in the case of non-environmental art, aesthetic flaws do not necessarily constitute ethical flaws. (shrink)

As James Harold notes in his generous and thoughtful commentary on Artistic Creation and Ethical Criticism (ACEC) (2020), there is much on which we agree, inclu.

If I had read Ted Nannicelli’s (2020) thoughtful and wide-ranging book before writing my own, I would not have written the same book that I did, and my book almost certainly would have been better for it. Ted Nannicelli’s 2020 book has many keen insights, and I learnt much from reading it.There is a great deal of overlap in our philosophical interests as well as in our views. Our books were written at the same time—at least, our writing times overlapped (...) significantly—and by the time Nannicelli's was published, mine was already finalized, and it was too late for me to incorporate his insights into my own book. So I welcome the opportunity, however belated, to think carefully about Nannicelli’s ideas in conversation with my own.The first and most important thing to emphasize is my agreement with Nannicelli on many significant matters. Both Nannicelli and I are critical of the overwhelming focus in the ethical criticism of art on what Nannicelli calls ‘perspectivism’, the view that works of art should be judged morally on the basis of the perspective they take up (or attitude they prescribe, or similar). We are also both sceptical about the strength of the arguments concerning the moral-cognitive benefits of art. Both of us think that we need a more expansive toolkit for thinking about art and morality, including attention to the circumstances under which an artwork is produced. (The latter is something that I discuss only briefly, but Nannicelli is right that it is deserving of more careful attention.) Both of us are neutral about specific normative ethical theories. Nannicelli and I are both worried about the problem of relativism and how that affects how we think about moral judgements of artworks. And I think Nannicelli shares my scepticism about the search for easy answers to hard moral questions about the value of art. (shrink)

Can artworks be morally good or bad? Many philosophers have thought so. Does this moral goodness or badness bear on how good or bad a work isas art?This is very much a live debate.Autonomistsargue that moral value is not relevant to artistic value;interactionistsargue that it is. In this paper, I argue that the debate between interactionists and autonomists has been conducted unfairly: all parties to the debate have tacitly accepted a set of constraints which prejudices the issue against the interactionist. (...) I identify two demands which are routinely placed on arguments seeking to establish interaction and argue that they are, in fact, mutually conflicting.There are two upshots. First, in light of this, it is unsurprising that arguments for interaction have failed to meet with everybody’s satisfaction. The constraints are such that no argument can meet them. Second, recognizing this helps us uncover a new, promising, but hitherto overlooked strategy for establishing artistic-ethical interaction. (shrink)

Advocates of the ethical criticism of art claim that works' ethical defects or merits have an impact on their aesthetic value. Against ethical critics, autonomists claim that moral criteria should not be part of the considerations when evaluating works of art as art. Autonomism refers to the view that an artwork's aesthetic value is independent from its ethical value. The purpose of this paper is to examine how autonomism has been defended in the contemporary discussion in analytic aesthetics. I present (...) three versions of autonomism: Richard Posner's radical autonomism, James C. Anderson and Jeffrey T. Dean, and James Harold's moderate autonomism, and Francisca Pérez Carreño's robust autonomism. I argue that robust autonomism offers a stronger argument against the ethical critic. However, I point to some difficulties for Pérez Carreño's account and conclude by suggesting how further work in autonomism might go around them. (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)

As aesthetic appreciators of the environment, we often encounter cases where our environmental commitments and our aesthetic responses do not seem to match. Some highly altered or contaminated environments may occasion powerful and insightful aesthetic experiences. In this article, I discuss some arguments that have been offered in favor of the view that this mismatch is not possible when we appreciate a particular environment with full awareness of its damaged or altered condition. I show that these arguments are not conclusive (...) and that there is room for valuable experiences of damaged or highly altered environments. Our knowledge of the damaged condition of an environment, while perceptually significant, does not necessarily make the resulting aesthetic experience to be negative. Finally, I show that these cases do not necessarily diminish the role that aesthetics can play in shaping our environmental sensibility and commitments. (shrink)

The present studies investigate morality’s influence on aesthetics and one potential moderator of that influence: genre. Study 1 finds that people’s moral evaluation positively influence their aesthetic evaluation of an artwork. Study 2 and 3 finds that this influence can be moderated by the contextual factor of genre. These results broaden our understanding of the relationship between morality and aesthetics, and suggest that models of art appreciation should take into account morality and its interaction with context. [Unpublishable 2010-2017.].

Alcune opere d'arte manifestano (o suggeriscono di assumere) prospettive morali dubbie e, in certi casi, chiaramente deprecabili. Ad esempio, il documentario propagandista Il Trionfo della Volontà di Leni Riefensthal esprime (e cerca di evocare) ammirazione nei confronti di Adolf Hitler. Nonostante ciò, Il Trionfo della Volontà è considerato un capolavoro nel genere dei documentari. Questo e molti altri esempi simili suggeriscono le seguenti domande: É possibile considerare un'opera d'arte un capolavoro artistico e, allo stesso tempo, un esempio di immoralità? La (...) valutazione morale di un'opera d'arte influisce o dovrebbe influire sulla valutazione artistica dell'opera? (shrink)