"This project was a work of philosophy investigating how artworks and other aesthetic objects and practices (henceforth ‘artworks’) acquire ethical properties and aesthetic properties, and how these two kinds of normative properties interact, if at all.
The project's main conclusions were the following: (1) that one way artworks can come to acquire ethical value is in virtue of prescribing appreciators to adopt pejorative attitudes towards oppressed groups merely in imagination, or (on the flip side) to embed such an prescription to imagine within an artistic context that unambiguously rejects those attitudes; (2) that a widely held principle, according to which artworks that prescribe unwarranted responses (e.g. laughter at something that isn't funny) are thereby aesthetically flawed, is false; (3) that in order to understand whether ethical properties can alter an artwork's aesthetic value in more than a trivial way, philosophers must first understand what kind of determining relationship they seek to establish between ethical and aesthetic value. For this, aestheticians and ethicists must turn to metaphysics.
These questions are important to society because the issue of the relevance of ethical to aesthetic properties in artworks is of perennial interest in the public sqaure, as evidenced by the mass interest in the #MeToo movement and the countless op-eds written about how the ethics of artists should bear on our appreciation of their work.
The project research comprises three objectives. Objective One (O1), the most concrete, is to propose new ways of theorizing how artworks acquire intrinsic ethical properties (henceforth just ‘ethical properties’). Roughly, these are ethical properties inhering in the artwork rather than in matters related to it externally, such as in consequences of appreciating a work. Objective Two (O2), the most abstract, is to offer a fundamental criticism of the entire literature which O1 addresses, and to articulate new ways of proceeding given this criticism. Objective Three (O3), the most positive, is to offer an account of ethico-aesthetic value interaction in light of the findings from O1 and O2."
