Tony Chackal

Environmental aesthetics concerns how environments are best appreciated. While many environmental aesthetic experiences occur at national parks, the latter face two problems that affect the former: a history of colonialization and disrespectful attitudes and actions by ecotourists. These problems are shown to be connected when seen as expressions of dualistic, anthropocentric and instrumentalist treatments of nature. Such treatments are widely critiqued as false and harmful in environmental ethics, but persist in some environmental aesthetic theories, even those that attempt to avoid them and ground appreciation in seemingly objective natural science. Indigenous perspectives have received scant attention in the discourse, but offer two beneficial concepts to avoid contemporary false and harmful treatments of nature: place and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). In native concepts of place, humans are seen as a part of nature, which is valued intrinsically and approached from an orientation of respect. Traditional ecological knowledge refers to the body of indigenous approaches to science, which produces place-based knowledge and unifies ecological, ethical and aesthetic values. Integrating sense of place and TEK in environmental aesthetics invites non-natives to consider different treatments that lead to more accurate understandings of and more just relationships with nature. These concepts can also be integrated at parklands with the help of native peoples acting as park stewards. Doing so provides benefits to environmental aesthetic appreciation and supports environmental justice for natives and ecological justice for non-natives.

Touch has recently gained attention in aesthetics. Carolyn Korsmeyer argues that touchable artefacts offer valuable aesthetic encounters with genuineness, rarity, and connection to the past. She employs Walter Benjamin’s argument that a unique work has an authenticity and aura that copies cannot have. Yet Benjamin undermines his own argument in another essay on the aesthetic value of collecting books, surely products of mechanical reproduction. This reintroduces questions concerning whether copies can have auras and if they involve a sense of touch relevant to aesthetic appreciation. I argue that vinyl records are copies that can have auras and better demonstrate the aesthetic value of touch because they require it, unlike Korsmeyer’s examples. Records can have auras in three senses: collections can be unique, they can have cult value, and records in play have a ‘surrounding glow’. The aesthetic value of touch, aura, and connection to the past is revealed by situating records within a practice of collecting and the material relationship between collector and collection.

Vinyl and record collectors continue to be the subject of contentious debate. A social perception exists that frames record collectors merely as elitists who think their tastes are superior to those who listen to digital formats and streaming platforms, who resist novel technology for its own sake, and mistakenly think vinyl carries aesthetic advantages because digital is held to be objectively superior. Yet vinyl and record collecting have aesthetic and social advantages unavailable in immaterial digital formats. These aesthetic advantages are auditory, tactile, and visual, while the social advantages are ethical, political, and cultural. Vinyl’s aesthetic and social advantages enable a ‘focal relationship’ with recorded music. Viewing them as what Albert Borgmann calls ‘focal things’ within the ‘focal practice’ of record collecting and viewing digital formats as ‘devices’ reveals each format’s aesthetic and social advantages and limitations. While records themselves possess some focal character, full focality is achieved only through a cultural practice of collecting.

Nurses experience various types of violence in healthcare. This violence can be perpetrated by doctors, other nurses, patients, and their families, as well as other members of the healthcare team. While traditionally thought of as physical, violence may also be non-physical, that is, verbal, emotional, and psychological in nature. In this paper, we outline three categories of violence experienced by nurses: vertical, lateral, and angular. When violence occurs by someone in a position of authority like physicians, it is vertical, when occurring by someone in an equal position like other nurses, it is lateral, and when violence occurs by someone in an adjacent position like patients, it is angular. Violence may carry violations of autonomy and justice for nurses. Autonomy and justice are two principles of healthcare ethics, which have traditionally been applied primarily to patients. We expand the application of these principles to healthcare workers and highlight how violence obstructs autonomy and justice for nurses. Some instances of violence obstruct autonomy by undermining nurses’ everyday decision-making while aggregate violence obstructs autonomy by causing some to leave the field altogether. Some instances of violence violate justice by undermining nurses’ epistemic capacities while others concern unfairness produced by unjust distributions of resources.

I describe two frameworks of individualism and autonomy— internal and external. I delineate and contextualize the two as the atomistic and ecological models, and add two frameworks to consider environments, the spatial and placed-based models, in order to show various ways in which features of the individual, autonomy, and social contexts are used in examining notions of thinking for oneself and moral responsibility. I argue that the external, ecological, and placed-based models have superior descriptive and normative power and are better suited to accommodate the externally arising social obstructions around race that constrain and obstruct autonomy, but that the two models are inconsistently used as a way to socially advantage some over others.

Autonomy is traditionally considered to be an epistemic capacity of individuals to think for themselves, and the community is held to be its central obstruction. Autonomy is the internal capacity to freely use reason to form beliefs and preferences that are one’s own. It is premised on the atomistic individual conceived as a decontextualized rational mind. Accordingly, natural, physical, and social externalities have not been included in discourse on autonomy. But if individuals are seen as embodied dwellers within social and natural environments and are reconceived as ecological, that is, partly constituted by their environments, then autonomy must likewise be reconceived. Ecological autonomy is an internal epistemic capacity to think and an external actional capacity to act for oneself in relation to other individuals and environments. Whereas traditional and even relational autonomy require that competency and authenticity conditions must be met for internal thinking, ecological autonomy requires two sets of competency and authenticity conditions, one for internal thought and one for external action. An ecological treatment holds that while community can obstruct autonomy, it also generates and sustains it to reveal how community and place are co-defined as mutually constitutive companion concepts with alternate emphases. Place emphasizes physical and social, and natural and artificial environments, but includes people and social practices. Community emphasizes people, social practices, knowledge, and values, but includes the environing world.

Individuals use their capacity for autonomy to express preferences regarding food choices. Food choices are fundamental, universal, and reflect a diversity of interests and cultural preferences. Traditionally, autonomy is cast in only epistemic terms, and the social and political dimension of it, where autonomy obstruction tends to arise, is omitted. This reflects problematic limits in the Cartesian notion of the individual. Because this notion ignores context and embodiment, the external and internal constraints on autonomy that extend from social location are not considered. Therefore, reconceptions of the individual and autonomy which emphasize social location and relational interdependency are needed. To combat autonomy obstruction, individuals can appeal to community and community autonomy as a social mechanism. Communities are social groups characterized by people living in places with shared goals. Recognizing their interdependency, individuals can organize as communities in order to accomplish objectives that they cannot on their own. While community autonomy is valuable unto itself, it can also enhance individual autonomy.

Street art is an art form that entails creating public works incorporating the street physically and in their meaning. That physical property is employed as an artistic resource in street art raises two questions. Are street artworks necessarily illegal? Does being illegal change the nature of production and aesthetic appreciation? First, I argue street artworks must be in the street. On my view, both the physical and sociocultural senses of the street can be constitutive of meaning. Second, I argue that illegality is a prototypical and paradigmatic feature of street art. While illegality alone does not make works better than sanctioned street art, it affects the production process and changes what is available to appreciate.