Art and Ethics: Restarting and Advancing a Stalled Debate

Cel

This project is a work of philosophy that investigates how intrinsic ethical properties are realized in artworks and other aesthetic and creative objects and practices, and in what respects their aesthetic values are determined by these properties. The project innovates in three principal ways. First, it identifies and articulates novel ways by which artworks and similar objects and practices come to exhibit ethical properties, where the existing literature in this area relies exclusively on just one way this can occur. Second, it diagnoses why the literature on the question of ethico-aesthetic value interaction has stagnated for almost a decade, by revealing the vague and inconsistent conceptual tools on which its theorists have relied until now, and which have inhibited its progress. Finally, it uses the preceding two innovations to articulate a new and satisfactory theory about how ethical properties determine aesthetic values.

The project promises to radically transform a live, if currently inert, philosophical literature while offering a comprehensive strategy to share its interdisciplinary and public interest benefits with stakeholders beyond philosophy and indeed the academy.