Fatal prescription
Fatal prescription
Ethicism is the most comprehensively defended answer to the question regarding whether ethical properties determine aesthetic properties in artworks. According to ethicism, aesthetically relevant ethical flaws in artworks count as aesthetic flaws and aesthetically relevant ethical merits count as aesthetic merits. In this paper, I argue that ethicism’s most significant argument, the Merited Response Argument (MRA) (and other moralist arguments like it) suffers from an ambiguity that makes it either unsound or uninteresting. Specifically, the notion of an artwork’s ‘prescribing’ a response, central to MRA, is ambiguous between merely attempting to elicit a response from appreciators as appropriate to a work, and endorsing a response as appropriate to relevant parts of the actual world. While the first sense of ‘prescribe’ does the aesthetic work, the second does the ethical.
151-163
Stear, Nils-Hennes
c3bd30ff-6d15-4cb5-bb7a-1a8d0ce16b9d
April 2020
Stear, Nils-Hennes
c3bd30ff-6d15-4cb5-bb7a-1a8d0ce16b9d
Abstract
Ethicism is the most comprehensively defended answer to the question regarding whether ethical properties determine aesthetic properties in artworks. According to ethicism, aesthetically relevant ethical flaws in artworks count as aesthetic flaws and aesthetically relevant ethical merits count as aesthetic merits. In this paper, I argue that ethicism’s most significant argument, the Merited Response Argument (MRA) (and other moralist arguments like it) suffers from an ambiguity that makes it either unsound or uninteresting. Specifically, the notion of an artwork’s ‘prescribing’ a response, central to MRA, is ambiguous between merely attempting to elicit a response from appreciators as appropriate to a work, and endorsing a response as appropriate to relevant parts of the actual world. While the first sense of ‘prescribe’ does the aesthetic work, the second does the ethical.
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Fatal Prescription - Finalish author version
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Accepted/In Press date: 2019
Published date: April 2020
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40 Thanks to audiences at the annual meetings of the British Society of Aesthetics (2016), American Society for Aesthetics (2016), and UNAM’s Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas. Thanks also to Adriana Clavel-Vázquez, Dan Jacobson, Andrew Stephenson, Lee Walters, and two anonymous referees. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 750848. All views are the author’s and not necessarily those of the EU or its subsidiaries.
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© 2020 British Society of Aesthetics 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.
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Local EPrints ID: 437998
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/437998
ISSN: 0007-0904
PURE UUID: abbe48af-2256-4516-9140-eca9395ddae2
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Date deposited: 25 Feb 2020 17:32
Last modified: 16 Mar 2024 06:47
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