'Moral and Aesthetic Judgments Reconsidered' (original) (raw)
Related papers
Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism
In this paper I discuss a position I term 'belief pessimism concerning aesthetic testimony' (BP). According to BP (i) judgements of aesthetic value are beliefs and (ii) aesthetic judgements are subject to some additional norm not active with respect to judgements concerning more mundane matters which (inter alia) prevents such judgements from legitimately being formed on the basis of testimony. In this paper I argue that we should reject BP -along with parallel positions which have been proposed in other areas such as judgements of moral value -since it faces a number of pressing objections relating to the nature of belief. Firstly, it proposes a fundamental difference between aesthetic beliefs and beliefs of other kinds without properly motivating this distinction. Secondly, and more fundamentally, BP is in tension with any plausible account of the nature of belief. I conclude, then, that we should reject at least one of (i) or (ii). My own view is that we should accept (i) and reject (ii) but I do not attempt to establish either part of this claim here.
"Judgment between Ethics and Aesthetics: An Introduction"
Judgment between Ethics and Aesthetics: An Introduction,’ co-written with Dennis Rothermel, A Critique of Judgment in Film and Television, in Silke Panse and Dennis Rothermel, eds., Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,, 2014
This collection responds to a significant increase of judgment and judgmentalism in contemporary television, film, and social media. Especially on television, works whose sole purpose is to generate judgment have multiplied. Judgment pervades contemporary television. The comment sections on online press webpages and blogs, along with social media such as Facebook and Twitter, elicit and propagate our judgments incessantly. The judgment of everyone and everything leaves a permanent digital footprint of that judgment on the judged, but also on those who judge, so that everyone is continuously cast as someone under judgment for what they say or endorse and for how they judge. In viewing we are also watched. In judging we are often also judged. The buyer judges the seller, and vice versa. Our most private relations are rated as transactions. Subjective judgment has left the internal realm of our own super-egos and instead is handed out in a public manner, forever archived in verdicts on screens. The rise of subjective judgment directs all areas of public and private life, at work and at leisure, from popular culture to academia. Judgment and competition are made to look as though they are synonymous.
2003
It has never been easy to locate and identify values in relation to nature. The Greeks were already aware of the distinction between nomos, or variable custom, and physis, or the way things are. This sense of an opposition between what is culturally local and variable and what is fixed and given in nature has only grown sharper with the advent of modernity and the increasing credibility of materialist meta physics. That birds lay eggs or that water quenches fire seem to be matters of fact, while that Bach's French Suites are beautiful or that Socrates is virtuous seem to be more problematic matters of value. At the same time, however, there is a great temptation to see such matters of value as at bottom matters of a special kind of fact. Making judgements of value is important to the conduct of cultural life, and there is enough consensus and argu ment about them at least to suggest that such judgements indeed track something, rather than being reflexes of what one might call mere taste or idiosyncrasy. The disciplines of aesthetics and ethics have consisted largely of various strategies for locating and identifying the relevant special facts that are tracked by judgements of value, pre-eminently judgements of beauty and artistic goodness, and judgements of duty and goodness of character. Perhaps because of the shared contrast with judgements about the natural world or the putatively materially given, these discip lines have often developed parallel stances and strategies in addressing the natures of values. This chapter will explore these parallels, emphasizing the side of aesthet ics, and culminating in an assessment of a family of recent expressivist-holist views that dwell on continuities among aesthetic, ethical, and philosophical expression.
ON AN APPARENT TRUISM IN AESTHETICS
It has often been claimed that adequate aesthetic judgements must be grounded in the appreciator's first-hand experience of the item judged. Yet this apparent truism is misleading if adequate aesthetic judgements can instead be based on descriptions of the item or on acquaintance with some surrogate for it. In a survey of responses to such challenges to the apparent truism, I identify several contentions presented in its favour, including stipulative definitions of 'aesthetic judgement', assertions about conceptual gaps between determinate aesthetic properties and even the most perfect descriptions, and claims about the holistic and sensibility-relative character of aesthetic qualities and values. W ith reference to considerations advanced by Frank Sibley, Alan H. Goldman, and particularists and anti-particularists in meta-ethics, I contend that strong versions of the apparent truism lack sufficient warrant. Two successors are proposed, however. One reframes the thesis in terms of our contingently limited descriptive and theoretical capacities with regard to a subset of the aesthetic qualities of extraordinary works; the second involves a shift from epistemic to axiological matters: what even the most perfect descriptions cannot provide, and in some cases spoil, is our gauging of an item's inherent, experiential value. MANY philosophers have maintained that adequate aesthetic judgements can only be based on first-hand experience. For example, Alan Tormey claims that In art, unlike the law, we do not admit judgments in the absence of direct or immediate experience of the object of the judgment. We require critical judgments to be rooted in 'eye-witness' encounters, and the epistemically indirect avenues of evidence, inference and authority that are permissible elsewhere are anathema here. 1
On the Moral Psychology and Normative Force of Aesthetic Reasons
Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics
This paper investigates the way in which we adduce reasons in support of our aesthetic judgements. We examine the seemingly question-begging nature of that process, such that any aesthetic quality we adduce as a reason can be found compelling qua reason for a particular judgement if and only if that judgement is already assented to. We then analyse this phenomenon in the parallel contexts of gustatory taste and friendship, where the differences are understood to lie primarily with differences in the normative force of reasons held in support of gustatory judgements, aesthetic judgements, and personal friendships. While some question-begging obtains in all cases, in the latter we can begin to see that friendship can be justified with reference to its contribution to the good of ourselves. This is explored further in connection with the way in which examining our reasons for being friends with people is actually productive and generative of that friendship. Our conclusion is that while the giving of reasons for aesthetic judgements is still subject to a certain question-begging, those judgements acquire a powerful normative force in cultural contexts where it can be seen that assenting to them constitutes the realization of our good as individuals. I Attempts to account for how we adduce reasons for our aesthetic judgements tend to present us with two broad philosophical alternatives. On the first, supporting our aesthetic judgements consists, roughly, in listing those features which, in some logical sense, may lead us to infer the presence of an aesthetic quality such as beauty or overall aesthetic value. This line of inquiry, as has frequently been pointed out, subsumes the aesthetic reason-giving process to fairly standard inductive reasoning, and, as such, may be said to overlook the fundamentally perceptual nature of the aesthetic. As Frank Sibley famously writes, 'aesthetic perception […] is essential to aesthetic judgement; one could not therefore be brought to make an aesthetic judgement simply as the outcome of considering reasons, however good'. 1 On the second alternative, this perceptual character serves as the very starting point of our aesthetic epistemology: the only real justification available to aesthetic judgements is so-called 'perceptual proof' .
Are there "aesthetic" judgments
Erkenntnis, 2023
In philosophy of aesthetics, scholars commonly express a commitment to the premise that there is a distinctive type of judgment that can be meaningfully labeled “aesthetic”, and that these judgments are distinctively different from other types of judgments. We argue that, within an Aristotelian framework, there is no clear avenue for meaningfully differentiating “aesthetic” judgment from other types of judgment, and, as such, we aim to question the assumption that aesthetic judgment does in fact constitute a distinctive kind of judgment that is in need of, or can be subject to, distinctive theorizing. We advance our argument primarily through demonstrating that leading contemporary accounts of aesthetic judgment do not successfully distinguish a type of judgment in that they do not tell us how making an aesthetic judgment differs substantially from judging that 2 + 3 = 5, that football is entertaining, or that today is Tuesday.
A Structural Disanalogy between Aesthetic and Ethical Value Judgments
The British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 51, 2011, pp. 51–67, 2011
It is often suggested that aesthetic and ethical value judgments are similar in such a way that they should be analyzed in analogous manners. In this paper, I argue that the two types of judgments share four important features concerning disagreement, motivation, categoricity, and argumentation. This, I maintain, helps to explain why many philosophers have thought that aesthetic and ethical value judgments can be analyzed in accordance with the same dispositional scheme which corresponds to the analogy between secondary qualities and values. However, I argue that aesthetic and ethical value judgments differ as regards their fundamental structures. This scheme is mistaken as regards ethical value judgments, but it is able to account for aesthetic value judgments. This implies that aesthetic value judgments are autonomous in relation to ethical value judgments and that aestheticians, not moral philosophers, are the true heirs of this renowned analogy.