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Meriting a response: The paradox of seductive artworks

Meriting a response: The paradox of seductive artworks
Meriting a response: The paradox of seductive artworks
According to what I call the Merit Principle, artworks attempting to elicit unmerited responses, such as horror films inviting fear towards something unfrightening, are aesthetically flawed. This paper shows how the principle generates a novel paradox when applied to an undertheorized class that I call ‘seductive works’: these necessarily invite an unmerited response in order to invite a (merited) repudiation of that response. I consider a number of unsuccessful attempts to preserve the Merit Principle, discuss what is challenging about seductive artworks, and briefly defend a new principle appealing to a general way that constraints under which a work operates condition its aesthetic value. This principle not only resolves the paradox, but explains the competing intuitions giving rise to it.
Art, Aesthetics, Ethics, Immoralism, Ethicism
0004-8402
465-482
Stear, Nils-Hennes
c3bd30ff-6d15-4cb5-bb7a-1a8d0ce16b9d
Stear, Nils-Hennes
c3bd30ff-6d15-4cb5-bb7a-1a8d0ce16b9d

Stear, Nils-Hennes (2019) Meriting a response: The paradox of seductive artworks. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 97 (3), 465-482. (doi:10.1080/00048402.2018.1502333).

Record type: Article

Abstract

According to what I call the Merit Principle, artworks attempting to elicit unmerited responses, such as horror films inviting fear towards something unfrightening, are aesthetically flawed. This paper shows how the principle generates a novel paradox when applied to an undertheorized class that I call ‘seductive works’: these necessarily invite an unmerited response in order to invite a (merited) repudiation of that response. I consider a number of unsuccessful attempts to preserve the Merit Principle, discuss what is challenging about seductive artworks, and briefly defend a new principle appealing to a general way that constraints under which a work operates condition its aesthetic value. This principle not only resolves the paradox, but explains the competing intuitions giving rise to it.

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Seductive Artworks - Final Manuscript - Accepted Manuscript
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Accepted/In Press date: 14 July 2018
e-pub ahead of print date: 7 November 2018
Published date: 3 July 2019
Keywords: Art, Aesthetics, Ethics, Immoralism, Ethicism

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 426835
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/426835
ISSN: 0004-8402
PURE UUID: 557f0fb5-9c2f-4314-8914-d27c59e6b64d

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Date deposited: 13 Dec 2018 12:23
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 21:55

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