•  19
    Aesthetic Snobbery
    Philosophy Compass 18 (9). 2023.
    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 …Read more
  •  105
    Fitting Attitude Theory and the Normativity of Jokes
    Erkenntnis 83 (6): 1303-1320. 2018.
    We defend a fitting-attitude theory of the funny against a set of potential objections. Ultimately, we endorse a version of FA theory that treats reasons for amusement as non-compelling, metaphysically non-conditional, and alterable by social features of the joke telling context. We find that this version of FA theory is well-suited to accommodate our ordinary practices of telling and being amused by jokes, and helpfully bears on the related faultless disagreement dispute.
  •  187
    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 attitudi…Read more
  •  8
    Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts (edited book)
    with David Goldblatt
    Routledge. 2017.
    93 Categories of Art -- 94 The Role of Theory in Aesthetics -- 95 Art and Natural Selection -- 96 Feminism in Context -- Contributors.
  •  22
    Games, motives, and virtue
    Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 48 (3): 369-379. 2021.
    In his groundbreaking and fantastic new book, Games: Agency as Art, C. Thi Nguyen asks us to see gameplay, and hence the ‘humorous, the playful, and the ridiculous’, as an important sphe...
  •  49
    Snobbery in Appreciative Contexts
    British Journal of Aesthetics 58 (3): 241-253. 2018.
    Matthew Kieran has recently argued that those he calls ‘appreciative snobs’ go wrong by valuing appreciative objects primarily because of their ability to raise the snob’s social status, what I call social contagion snobbery. In this paper, I argue that there are at least two other ways that snobbery commonly manifests itself in appreciative contexts, what I call attitudinal snobbery and contextual snobbery. As it turns out, all three snobs—Kieran’s social-contagion snob, the attitudinal snob, a…Read more
  •  1
    Aesthetics: A Reader in the Philosophy of the Arts, 4th edition (edited book)
    with David Goldblatt and Lee Brown
    Routledge. 2017.
  •  91
    Video Games and Imaginative Identification
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 75 (2): 181-184. 2017.
  •  418
    Pornography, ethics, and video games
    Ethics and Information Technology 15 (1): 25-34. 2013.
    In a recent and provocative essay, Christopher Bartel attempts to resolve the gamer’s dilemma. The dilemma, formulated by Morgan Luck, goes as follows: there is no principled distinction between virtual murder and virtual pedophilia. So, we’ll have to give up either our intuition that virtual murder is morally permissible—seemingly leaving us over-moralizing our gameplay—or our intuition that acts of virtual pedophilia are morally troubling—seemingly leaving us under-moralizing our game play. Ba…Read more
  •  17
    Aesthetics and Morality by schellekens, elisabeth
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (4): 423-426. 2009.
  •  100
    Moral vices as artistic virtues: Eugene onegin and Alice
    Philosophia 36 (2): 181-193. 2008.
    Moralists hold that art criticism can and should take stock of moral considerations. Though moralists disagree over the proper scope of ethical art criticism, they are unified in their acceptance of the consistency of valence thesis: when an artwork fares poorly from the moral point of view, and this fact is art critically relevant, then it is thereby worse qua artwork. In this paper, I argue that a commitment to moralism, however strong, is unattractive because it requires that we radically rev…Read more
  •  43
    Philosophy, Black Film, Film Noir by flory, dan
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69 (2): 242-244. 2011.
  •  233
    The incorrigible social meaning of video game imagery
    Ethics and Information Technology 13 (4): 303-312. 2010.
    In this paper, I consider a particular amoralist challenge against those who would morally criticize our single-player video play, viz., “come on, it’s only a game!” The amoralist challenge with which I engage gains strength from two facts: the activities to which the amoralist lays claim are only those that do not involve interactions with other rational or sentient creatures, and the amoralist concedes that there may be extrinsic, consequentialist considerations that support legitimate moral c…Read more