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A funny taste : immoral humour and unwilling amusementIn Daniel O'Shiel & Viktoras Bachmetjevas (eds.), Philosophy of Humour: New Perspectives, Brill. 2023.
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14A Sensibility of HumourBritish Journal of Aesthetics 64 (1): 1-16. 2023.What does it say about you if you enjoy sexist humour? One answer to this question holds that finding sexist humour funny reveals that you have sexist beliefs, whilst another holds that it reveals nothing deeper about you at all. I argue that neither of these answers are correct, as neither can capture the feeling of unwilling complicity we often get from enjoying sexist jokes. Rather, we should navigate between these two positions by understanding the sense of humour as a kind of sensibility or…Read more
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32Just Kidding? Two Roles for the Concept of Joking in Political SpeechPhilosophical Quarterly. forthcoming.In this paper, I discuss two roles for the concept of joking in political speech. First, I discuss how claiming to have been joking can provide speakers with a powerful form of deniability. I argue that the aesthetic dimension of jokes makes such a denial especially well placed to undermine both a hearer's evidence for an utterance having been sincere, and, separately, their belief that it was sincere—I call the latter ‘aesthetic gaslighting’. Second, I discuss the use of jokes to influence hear…Read more
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42A Sensibility of Humour: BSA Prize Essay, 2022British Journal of Aesthetics. forthcoming.What does it say about you if you enjoy sexist humour? One answer to this question holds that finding sexist humour funny reveals that you have sexist beliefs, whilst another holds that it reveals nothing deeper about you at all. I argue that neither of these answers are correct, as neither can capture the feeling of unwilling complicity we often get from enjoying sexist jokes. Rather, we should navigate between these two positions by understanding the sense of humour as a kind of sensibility or…Read more
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18Bennett W. Helm, Communities of Respect: Grounding Responsibility, Authority, & Dignity (review)Journal of Moral Philosophy 18 (4): 413-416. 2021.
Oxford, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Humour |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
Pragmatics |
Aesthetics and Ethics |