Stephanie Patridge

This essay briefly introduces and contextualizes the extant work on aesthetic snobbery, and identifies some areas for further inquiry. Currently four kinds of snobbery have been identified—social contagion snobbery, attitudinal snobbery, contextual snobbery, and straight-up classist snobbery. Interestingly, each kind of snobbery is thought to manifest itself as a distinct epistemic failing, and for this reason they are advanced as distinct, non-competing kinds of snobbery. Some snob’s aesthetic judgments will be false or unjustified (social-contagion and straight-up classist), some will be unfitting (contextual), and some will fail to have an apt attitude toward their aesthetic judgment (attitudinal). Because the debate has been framed so narrowly, on how the vice of aesthetic snobbery undermines aesthetic judgment, several fruitful areas of philosophical investigation remain unexplored.

In a series of important papers, Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson argue that all extant neo-sentimentalists are guilty of a conflation error that they call the moralistic fallacy. One commits the moralistic fallacy when one infers from the fact that it would be morally wrong to experience an affective attitude—e.g., it would be wrong to be amused—that the attitude does not fit its object—e.g., that it is not funny. Such inferences, they argue, conflate the appropriateness conditions of attitudinal responses with the fittingness conditions of the associated evaluative properties. Further, they argue that moral considerations are irrelevant for determining if amusement fits its object. We agree that a strong moralizing of humor is wrongheaded and that jokes can be quite funny even in cases where we have a compelling moral reason to not be amused. However, we argue that pace D’Arms and Jacobson moral considerations can be relevant for property ascription. On our view, in order for a joke to be funny, a properly sensitive agent must take herself to have a contributory reason to be amused, and in some cases that she lacks such a reason is best explained by appeal to moral considerations. We use this constraint as the basis of what we call our modest proposal for a modest sentimentalism