Journal Articles
• The Qua Problem in the Value Interaction Debate, The British Journal of Aesthetics, forthcoming.
This essay aims to elucidate the so-called qua problem often invoked in the debate on the interaction between moral and artistic values. The qua problem is currently understood as the failure to establish a direct value interaction. I argue that this way of understanding the qua problem is flawed because it does not make the qua problem a real problem—that is, a problem that makes an interactionist argument unsuccessful when the argument has the problem. Instead, I propose that the qua problem should be understood as the failure to show that the fact that an artwork is (im)moral (as opposed to other related facts, such as those that ground this fact) explains, whether directly or indirectly, the work’s artistic value (as opposed to being connected to the artistic value in some other way).
https://doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/ayae025
• Examining Hypothetical Intentionalism, The British Journal of Aesthetics, forthcoming.
This essay examines Jerrold Levinson’s hypothetical intentionalism with respect to the following two objections raised by actual intentionalists: (1) it is arbitrary to exclude certain kinds of evidence, such as the author’s pronouncements of intention, when hypothesizing about authorial intention; and (2) there exist counterexamples. I argue that these objections fail to establish that actual intentionalism is superior to hypothetical intentionalism and that hypothetical intentionalism is more plausible than actual intentionalism. I also suggest, however, that hypothetical intentionalism has difficulties when applied to truth in fiction and thus may not be a complete theory of literary work meaning broadly construed.
• The Selectivity of Aesthetic Explanation, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 79 (1):5-15. 2021.
It is widely agreed that an artwork’s having certain non-aesthetic properties explains its having a certain aesthetic property. One interesting feature of such an explanation is its selectivity—it cites only some of the non-aesthetic properties on which the presence of the aesthetic property depends. Hence a question arises as to what distinguishes the selected non-aesthetic properties from the unselected ones. I answer this question by proposing a selection principle modeled on Laura Franklin-Hall’s selection principle for causal explanation, according to which an explanation selects a package of factors that maximizes the ratio of delivery (the degree to which the factors cited in an explanation make what is explained modally robust) to cost (the amount of information an explanation contains).
https://doi.org/10.1093/jaac/kpaa002
• Aptness of Fiction-Directed Emotions, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 60(1): 45-59. 2020.
I argue that the criteria governing the aptness of emotions directed towards fictional entities, such as characters and events in fiction, are structurally identical to the criteria governing the aptness of emotions directed towards real entities in the following sense: in both cases, aptness is characterized in terms of fittingness, justification, and being salience-tracking, and each of these notions is understood in an analogous way across reality- and fiction-directed emotions. The only differences are that, in the case of fiction-directed emotions, fictional truth rather than truth is relevant to fittingness, and salience in the context of engaging with the fiction replaces salience in the real context. Other asymmetries between the aptness criteria of fiction- and reality-directed emotions that seem to conflict with this claim are reducible to these two differences or stem from the failure to distinguish between emotions directed towards the content of a fiction and the fiction itself.
https://doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/ayz028
• The Nature of the Interaction between Moral and Artistic Value, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 76 (3): 285-295. 2018.
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.
https://doi.org/10.1111/jaac.12580
Book Chapters
• Distinguishing between Ethics and Aesthetics, Oxford Handbook of Ethics and Art, James Harold (Ed.), 2023.
Recent discussion of the relationship between the aesthetic and the ethical has focused on whether and how the two realms interact with one another. Behind this value interaction debate lies the implicit assumption that the aesthetic and the ethical are distinct. But are the two realms indeed distinct and, if so, in what ways? This chapter surveys existing discussions related to this question and explores the implications that they might have for the value interaction debate. In doing so, the chapter focuses on three specific questions that correspond to three ways in which the aesthetics and the ethical may not be fully distinct: (1) Are the aesthetic and the ethical identical? (2) Do they partly overlap? (3) Is one of them part of the other?