•  34
    Philosophical aesthetics has recently been expanding its purview—with exciting work on everyday aesthetics, somaesthetics, gustatory aesthetics, and the aesthetics of imperceptibilia like mathematics and human character—reclaiming territory that was lost during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the discipline begun concentrating almost exclusively on the philosophy of art and restricted the aesthetic realm to the distally perceptible. Yet there remains considerable reluctance towards …Read more
  •  7
    Values and Virtues for a Challenging World (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. forthcoming.
  •  12
    Introduction
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 92 1-3. 2022.
  •  43
    On the Importance of Beauty and Taste
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 92 229-252. 2022.
    We have all heard people say ‘Beauty is only skin-deep’, or ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’: our culture promulgates a conception of beauty as subjective, superficial, and independent of other values like moral goodness or knowledge and understanding. Yet our taste in beauty affects many aspects of our lives, sometimes playing a decisive – and often detrimental – role in areas as wide-ranging as our identity and self-esteem, our morally salient decisions, and our relationship to the envir…Read more
  •  18
    James Harold, "Dangerous Art: On Moral Criticism of Artwork." (review)
    Philosophy in Review 41 (4): 236-240. 2021.
  •  23
    Educating Character Through the Arts (edited book)
    with Laura D'Olimpio and Aidan P. Thompson
    Routledge. 2022.
    This volume investigates the role of the arts in character education. Bringing together insights from esteemed philosophers and educationalists, it looks to the arts for insight into human character and explores the arts' relationship to human flourishing and the development of the virtues. Focusing on the moral value of art and considering questions of whether there can be educational value in imaginative and non-narrative art, the nine chapters herein critically examine whether poetry, music, …Read more
  •  25
    The Aesthetics of Ethics: Exemplarism, Beauty, and the Psychology of Morality
    Journal of Value Inquiry 56 (4): 601-625. 2022.
    Linda Zagzebski recently put forward a new theory, moral exemplarism, that is meant to provide an alternative to theories like consequentialism and deontology, and which proposes to define key moral terms by direct reference to exemplars. The theory’s basic structure is straightforward. A virtuous person is defined as a person like that, where that points to individuals like Leopold Socha, Confucius, Jesus Christ, and so on. A key component of this theory is the function played by the emotions, …Read more
  •  114
    Functional Beauty, Pleasure, and Experience
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (3): 516-530. 2020.
    I offer a set of sufficient conditions for beauty, drawing on Parsons and Carlson’s account of ‘functional beauty’. First, I argue that their account is flawed, whilst falling short of...
  •  108
    The ‘Moralism’ in Immoralism: A Critique of Immoralism in Aesthetics
    British Journal of Aesthetics 59 (1): 13-33. 2018.
    According to immoralists, some artworks are better aesthetically in virtue of their immorality. A. W. Eaton recently offered a novel defence of this view, seeking to overcome shortcomings in previous accounts, thereby occasioning a reconsideration of immoralism. Yet, as I argue in this paper, Eaton’s attempt is unsuccessful, insofar as it consists partly of inadequately supported claims, and partly—and more interestingly, albeit paradoxically––of covert moralist assumptions that are, eo ipso, in…Read more
  •  70
    On Form, and the Possibility of Moral Beauty
    Metaphilosophy 49 (5): 711-729. 2018.
    There is a tendency in contemporary (analytic) aesthetics to consider- ably restrict the scope of things that can be beautiful or ugly. This peculiarly modern tendency is holding back progress in aesthetics and robbing it of its potential contribution to other domains of inquiry. One view that has suffered neglect as a result of this tendency is the moral beauty view, whereby the moral virtues are beautiful and the moral vices are ugly. This neglect stems from an assumption to the effect that vi…Read more
  •  41
    Art, Morality and Human Nature: Writings (review)
    British Journal of Aesthetics 59 (1): 105-109. 2019.
    Art, Morality and Human Nature: Writings by BeardsmoreRichard W.HaldaneJohn and LloydIeuan imprint academic. 2017. pp. 340. £19.95.
  •  72
    The Empirical Case for Moral Beauty
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (4): 642-656. 2018.
    ABSTRACTAlthough formative of modern value theory, the moral beauty view—which states that moral virtue is beautiful and moral vice is ugly—is now mostly neglected by philosophers. The two contemporary defences of the view mostly capitalize on its intuitive attractiveness, but to little avail: such considerations hardly convince sceptics of what is nowadays a rather unpopular view. Historically, the view was supported by thought experiments; and although these greatly increase its plausibility, …Read more
  •  94
    The Deformity-Related Conception of Ugliness
    British Journal of Aesthetics 57 (2): 139-160. 2017.
    Ugliness is a neglected topic in contemporary analytic aesthetics. This is regrettable given that this topic is not just genuinely fascinating, but could also illuminate other areas in the field, seeing as ugliness, albeit unexplored, does feature rather prominently in several debates in aesthetics. This paper articulates a ‘deformity-related’ conception of ugliness. Ultimately, I argue that deformity, understood in a certain way, and displeasure, jointly suffice for ugliness. First, I motivate …Read more
  •  108
    Considerable progress in personality and social psychology has been largely ignored by philosophers, many of whom still remain sceptical concerning whether the conception of character presupposed by virtue theory is descriptively adequate. Here, I employ the five-factor model of personality, currently the consensus view in personality psychology, to respond to a strong reading of the situationist challenge, whereby most people lack dispositions that are both cross-situationally consistent and te…Read more