Angela Sun

This dissertation offers an account of the role of integrity in our agency. I argue that the unification of our actions, commitments, intentions, and other facets agency into a coherent whole is essential for our self-governance: our ability to be the authors of our own lives and to act in ways that reflect what we stand for. When we are fragmented – when our commitments conflict, or we otherwise fail to live up to what they require of us – we experience inner conflicts that hinder our ability to be self-governing. However, integrity is not the only thing that matters for our agency. Throughout the dissertation, I remain sensitive to the limits of integrity’s value, as well as to ways that non-ideal circumstances prevent many people from integrating their agency.

When we evaluate artworks, we often point to what an artist could have done or what a work could have been in order to say something about the work as it actually is. Call this counterfactual reasoning in art criticism. On my account, counterfactual claims about artworks involve comparative aesthetic judgments between actual artworks and hypothetical variations of those works. The practice of imagining what an artwork could have been is critically useful because it can help us understand how artworks achieve specific aesthetic effects. I conclude by responding to an objection to my account on the basis that it violates the widely accepted acquaintance principle in aesthetics, on which aesthetic judgments must be based on firsthand perceptual encounters with their objects.