bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Situation ethics
Authors: Outka Gene
Published: September 2018

‘Situation ethics’ accords morally decisive weight to particular circumstances in judging whether an action is right or wrong. Thus we should examine critically all traditional rules prohibiting kinds of actions. Proponents of these views have exerted their greatest influence in Europe and North America in the twentieth century, although such influence waned by 1980. The views received extensive scrutiny in Christian communities. Three quite different warrants were offered for privileging discrete situations. First, we should remain dispositionally open to God’s immediate command in a particular time and place (theological contextualism). Second, we should take the actual consequences of particular actions as morally decisive (empirical situationism). Third, we should be ready to perform actions that compromise moral ideals when doing so improves matters in ways a given situation, with its distinctive constraints, makes viable (mournful realism).
Solidarity
Authors: Mason Andrew
Published: September 2018

Solidarity exists among a group of people when they are committed to abiding by the outcome of some process of collective decision-making, or to promoting the wellbeing of other members of the group, perhaps at significant cost to themselves. Many regard solidarity as an important political ideal on the grounds that it is related to community and fraternity, and conducive to social cohesion and stability. Some individualists, however, believe that it is incompatible with autonomy on the grounds that full autonomy requires one always to take the final decision oneself about what one should do.
Moral relativism
Authors: Wong David B.
Published: September 2018

Often the subject of heated debate, moral relativism is a cluster of doctrines concerning diversity of moral judgment across time, societies and individuals. Descriptive relativism is the doctrine that extensive diversity exists and that it concerns values and principles central to moralities. Meta-ethical relativism is the doctrine that there is no single true or most justified morality. Normative relativism is the doctrine that it is morally wrong to pass judgment on or to interfere with the moral practices of others who have adopted moralities different from one’s own. Much debate about relativism revolves around the questions of whether descriptive relativism accurately portrays moral diversity and whether actual diversity supports meta-ethical and normative relativism. Some critics also fear that relativism can slide into nihilism.
Suffering
Authors: Degrazia David
Published: September 2018

Although sometimes identified with pain, suffering is better understood as a highly unpleasant emotional state associated with considerable pain or distress. Whether and how much one suffers can vary in accordance with any meaning attached to the associated pain or distress, or with expectations regarding the future. Because suffering can be affected by thoughts of meaning or of the future, some have focused on this dimension of suffering and asserted that only humans can suffer. But there is a very strong empirical case that many nonhuman animals suffer. The fact of suffering provokes moral concern, especially when suffering is caused unnecessarily, and raises ethical questions, mainly regarding the nature and extent of our obligations to those who suffer. Suffering is also an important source of personal or religious meaning in many people’s lives.
Teleological ethics
Authors: Korsgaard Christine M.
Published: September 2018

The Greek telos means final purpose; a teleological ethical theory explains and justifies ethical values by reference to some final purpose or good. Two different types of ethical theory have been called teleological, however. Ancient Greek theories are ‘teleological’ because they identify virtue with the perfection of human nature. Modern utilitarianism is ‘teleological’ because it defines right conduct as that which promotes the best consequences.
Theory and practice
Authors: Oneill John
Published: September 2018

Questions concerning the relation of ‘theory’ to ‘practice’ include whether there is a role for theory in the practical realm of ethics and politics; if so, how it can guide or provide justificatory reasons for practice; how reference to ethical practices might enter into the justification of theory; and whether theory can play a role in the critical appraisal of social practice. In responding to these issues, different conceptions of theory and practice need to be distinguished. Justifiable scepticism about ambitious claims for ethical theory need not rule out a more modest role for theoretical reflection on practice.
Trust
Authors: Jones Karen
Published: September 2018

Most people writing on trust accept the following claims: trust involves risk; trusters do not constantly monitor those they trust; trust enhances the effectiveness of agency; and trust and distrust are self-confirming. Three further claims are widely accepted: trust and distrust are contraries but not contradictories; trust cannot be willed; and trust has noninstrumental value. Accounts of trust divide into three families: risk-assessment accounts, which are indifferent to the reasons why one trusts; will-based accounts, which stress the importance of the motives of those who are trusted; and affective attitude accounts, which claim that trust is a feeling as well as a judgment and a disposition to act. One of the central questions concerns when trust is justified, and, in particular, whether justified trusting can outstrip evidence for the belief that the person trusted is trustworthy. If trust can leap ahead of evidence of trustworthiness, then trust poses a problem for evidentialism, or the view that one should never believe anything without sufficient evidence. Further central questions include whether trusting is a virtue and trustworthiness morally required, while a final set of questions concerns the role of trust in politics and the connection between interpersonal trust and trust in institutions.
Utilitarianism
Authors: Chappell Tim
Published: September 2018

Utilitarianism is a theory about rightness, according to which the only good thing is welfare (wellbeing or ‘utility’). Welfare should, in some way, be maximized, and agents are to be neutral between their own welfare, and that of other people and of other sentient beings.

The roots of utilitarianism lie in ancient thought. Traditionally, welfare has been seen as the greatest balance of pleasure over pain, a view discussed in Plato. The notion of impartiality also has its roots in Plato, as well as in Stoicism and Christianity. In the modern period, utilitarianism grew out of the Enlightenment, its two major proponents being Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.

Hedonists, believing that pleasure is the good, have long been criticized for sensualism, a charge Mill attempted to answer with a distinction between higher and lower pleasures. He contended that welfare consists in the experiencing of pleasurable mental states, suggesting, in contrast to Bentham, that the quality, not simply the amount, of a pleasure is what matters. Others have doubted this conception, and developed desire accounts, according to which welfare lies in the satisfaction of desire. Ideal theorists suggest that certain things are just good or bad for people, independently of pleasure and desire.

Utilitarianism has usually focused on actions. The most common form is act-utilitarianism, according to which what makes an action right is its maximizing total or average utility. Some, however, have argued that constantly attempting to put utilitarianism into practice could be self-defeating, in that utility would not be maximized by so doing. Many utilitarians have therefore advocated non-utilitarian decision procedures, often based on common sense morality. Some have felt the appeal of common sense moral principles in themselves, and sought to reconcile utilitarianism with them. According to rule-utilitarianism, the right action is that which is consistent with those rules which would maximize utility if all accepted them.

There have been many arguments for utilitarianism, the most common being an appeal to reflective belief or ‘intuition’. One of the most interesting is Henry Sidgwick’s argument, which is ultimately intuitionist, and results from sustained reflection on common sense morality. The most famous argument is Mill’s ‘proof’. In recent times, R.M. Hare has offered a logical argument for utilitarianism.

The main problems for utilitarianism emerge out of its conflict with common sense morality, in particular justice, and its impartial conception of practical reasoning.
Utilitarianism
Authors: Crisp Roger , Chappell Tim
Published: September 2018

Utilitarianism is a theory about rightness, according to which the only good thing is welfare (well-being or ‘utility’). Welfare should, in some way, be maximized, and agents are to be neutral between their own welfare, and that of other people and of other sentient beings.

The roots of utilitarianism lie in ancient thought. Traditionally, welfare has been seen as the greatest balance of pleasure over pain, a view discussed in Plato. The notion of impartiality also has its roots in Plato, as well as in Stoicism and Christianity. In the modern period, utilitarianism grew out of the Enlightenment, its two major proponents being Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.

Hedonists, believing that pleasure is the good, have long been criticized for sensualism, a charge Mill attempted to answer with a distinction between higher and lower pleasures. He contended that welfare consists in the experiencing of pleasurable mental states, suggesting, in contrast to Bentham, that the quality, not simply the amount, of a pleasure is what matters. Others have doubted this conception, and developed desire accounts, according to which welfare lies in the satisfaction of desire. Ideal theorists suggest that certain things are just good or bad for people, independently of pleasure and desire.

Utilitarianism has usually focused on actions. The most common form is act-utilitarianism, according to which what makes an action right is its maximizing total or average utility. Some, however, have argued that constantly attempting to put utilitarianism into practice could be self-defeating, in that utility would not be maximized by so doing. Many utilitarians have therefore advocated nonutilitarian decision procedures, often based on common-sense morality. Some have felt the appeal of common-sense moral principles in themselves, and sought to reconcile utilitarianism with them. In particular, the extreme demandingness of act-utilitarianism has been found objectionable, since it rules out the giving of any special weight by the agent to their own interests or the interests of those close to them. This is one of the reasons for the development of rule-utilitarianism, according to which the right action is that which is consistent with those rules which would maximize utility if all accepted them.

There have been many arguments for utilitarianism, the most common being an appeal to reflective belief or ‘intuition’. One of the most interesting is Henry Sidgwick’s argument, which is ultimately intuitionist, and results from sustained reflection on common-sense morality. The most famous argument is Mill’s ‘proof’. In recent times, R. M. Hare has offered a logical argument for utilitarianism.

The main problems for utilitarianism emerge out of its conflict with common-sense morality, in particular justice, and its impartial conception of practical reasoning.
Values
Authors: Thomas Alan
Published: September 2018

The theory of value has three main traditions: subjectivism, which holds that the only valuable goods are subjective states of sentient beings; objectivism, which claims that while values must be human-related, they exist independently of us; and Neo-Kantian rationalism, which suggests that value is postulated on the basis of practical reason. Central distinctions in the theory of value are between subjective and objective values, instrumental and final values, intrinsic and extrinsic values, organic unities and the idea of an ultimate or architectonic value. There are also distinctions drawn between different types of value, such as moral and aesthetic value.
Virtues and vices
Authors: Williams Bernard
Published: September 2018

The concept of a virtue can make an important contribution to a philosophical account of ethics, but virtue theory should not be seen as parallel to other ‘ethical theories’ in trying to provide a guide to action.

Modern accounts of the virtues typically start from Aristotle, but they need to modify his view substantially, with respect to the grounding of the virtues in human nature; the question of what virtues there are; their unity; and their psychological identity as dispositions of the agent. In particular, one must acknowledge the historical variability of what have been counted as virtues.

Aristotle saw vices as failings, but modern opinion must recognize more radical forms of viciousness or evil. It may also need to accept that the good is more intimately connected with its enemies than traditional views have allowed. Virtue theory helps in the discussion of such questions by offering greater resources of psychological realism than other approaches.
Wollaston, William (1660–1724)
Authors: Brown Charlotte R.
Published: September 2018

William Wollaston, a popular eighteenth-century English moral philosopher, is often grouped with Samuel Clarke as a staunch defender of the kind of moral rationalism that David Hume later opposed. Wollaston’s project, as he describes it, is to find a rule to distinguish right actions from wrong. He complains that previous philosophers have either overlooked this task or proposed rules which are imprecise, incomplete or misleading. The rule he proposes is fidelity to truth. Actions, he argues, express propositions and so may be true or false. Moral actions express truths and immoral actions express falsehoods. He thinks this rule explains other widely held views about morality, for example, that we should live in accordance with nature, right reason or the will of God. His most remembered (and most misunderstood) claim is that an evildoer ‘lives a lie’.
Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759–1797)
Authors: Zaw Susan Khin
Published: September 2018

Wollstonecraft used the rationalist and egalitarian ideas of late eighteenth-century radical liberalism to attack the subjugation of women and to display its roots in the social construction of gender. Her political philosophy draws on Rousseau’s philosophical anthropology, rational religion, and an original moral psychology which integrates reason and feeling in the production of virtue. Relations between men and women are corrupted by artificial gender distinctions, just as political relations are corrupted by artificial distinctions of rank, wealth and power. Conventional, artificial morality distinguishes between male and female virtue; true virtue is gender-neutral, consists in the imitation of God, and depends on the unimpeded development of natural faculties common to both sexes, including both reason and passion. Political justice and private virtue are interdependent: neither can advance without an advance in the other.
Journalism, ethics of
Authors: Belsey Andrew
Published: September 2018

It is sometimes suggested that ethical principles, even fundamental ones like nonmaleficence and beneficence, are totally out of place in journalism, and that it should be shaped solely by market forces. This suggestion should be resisted. One reason why journalism should be ethical is that in a democracy it is expected to serve the public interest, which means that it should accept the responsibility to circulate the information and opinion without which a democracy could not operate, and to enable it to do this the freedom of the press is acknowledged.

If journalism is to serve the public interest, then a commitment to truth-telling is fundamental. Journalists should also be fair and accurate in reporting news, should publish corrections, should offer a right of reply. They should avoid discrimination, deception, harassment, betraying confidences and invasions of privacy. But ethical journalism is more than lists of requirements and prohibitions. In investigative journalism, for example, some deception or intrusion into privacy could be justified in order to uncover corruption. Ethical journalism is therefore reflective understanding of the underlying principles of harm and benefit and the public interest, and an ability to apply them in particular cases.
Engineering and ethics
Authors: Davis Michael
Published: September 2018

Engineering ethics is that form of applied or professional ethics concerned with the conduct of engineers. Though engineers do many different things, they share a common history, which includes codes of ethics. Most codes explicitly declare public health, safety and welfare to be ‘paramount’. Many questions of engineering ethics concern interpretation of ‘public’, ‘safety’ and ‘paramount’. Engineers also have important obligations to client and employer, including confidentiality, proper response to conflict of interest, stewardship of resources, and honesty (not only avoiding false statements but volunteering certain information). Each engineer also has obligations to other engineers and to the profession as a whole.
Nursing ethics
Authors: Hunt Geoffrey
Published: September 2018

Nursing ethics may be defined simply in relation to what nurses do that doctors and others do not characteristically do; or in relation to the nursing perspective on any issues in health care and medicine. More radically, it claims to employ a distinctive conceptual framework, regarding care, rather than cure, as fundamental. Nursing ethics concerns itself with the relationship between ‘carer’ and ‘cared for’ and the meanings embedded in that relationship. It is the moral exploration of an illness or disability as a personal life crisis rather than an instance of a biomedical generalization.
Pornography
Authors: Mendus Susan
Published: September 2018

There are three main questions about pornography. (1) How is pornography to be defined? Some definitions include the contention that it is morally wrong, while others define it neutrally in terms of its content and function. (2) Why is it wrong? Some accounts see the moral wrong of pornography in its tendency to corrupt individuals or to have detrimental effects on the morality of society; other accounts declare pornography to be objectionable only in so far as it causes physical harm to those involved in its production, or offence to unwilling observers. (3) Should pornography be restricted by law? Controversy here centres around whether the law should be used to discourage immorality, and whether the importance of free speech and individual autonomy are such as to rule out legislating against pornography. Here, the pornography debate raises very general questions about law and about autonomy in liberal societies.
Ross, William David (1877–1971)
Authors: McNaughton David
Published: September 2018

W.D. Ross was a British ancient and moral philosopher. In terms of his moral thinking, he was a pluralist, who held that there are several distinct moral considerations which bear on the rightness of an action. Among the things we need to take into account are promises we have made, the need to avoid harming others, gratitude to benefactors, and the amount of good our action will produce. That these considerations are morally relevant is something we can know, but which action is the right one is a matter of fallible judgment, because that will depend upon how these considerations are to be weighed against each other in the particular case. Ross’ contributions to the study of ancient philosophy mainly concerned Aristotle. He is now best known, however, for his moral philosophy.
Stevenson, Charles Leslie (1908–79)
Authors: Dreier James
Published: September 2018

Stevenson’s major contribution to philosophy was his development of emotivism, a theory of ethical language according to which moral judgments do not state any sort of fact, but rather express the moral emotions of the speaker and attempt to influence others.
Moral particularism
Authors: Crisp Roger
Published: September 2018

Moral particularism is a broad set of views which play down the role of general moral principles in moral philosophy and practice. Particularists stress the role of examples in moral education and of moral sensitivity or judgment in moral decision-making, as well as criticizing moral theories which advocate or rest upon general principles. It has not yet been demonstrated that particularism constitutes an importantly controversial position in moral philosophy.
Normativity
Authors: Darwall Stephen
Published: September 2018

Something is said by philosophers to have ‘normativity’ when it entails that some action, attitude or mental state of some other kind is justified, an action one ought to do or a state one ought to be in. The philosophical area most distinctively concerned with normativity, almost by definition, is ethics. Arguably, every ethical concept or category involves normativity of some kind. One area of lively debate within ethics concerns the precise kind of normativity that is possessed by different ethical concepts: moral wrongness, virtue, well-being and so on. For example, if an action is wrong, does that entail that there is reason not to do it or just that there is reason to take a certain attitude (blame) towards those who do act in that way?

A second way in which ethics is concerned with normativity is in investigating how an ethical proposition’s normative claim might be vindicated and considering whether it actually is vindicated. For example, if an action is morally wrong only if there is reason not to do it, can we then satisfactorily establish that any actions actually are wrong?

Yet a third kind of engagement with normativity concerns the very sources of normativity itself. An attempt to vindicate or debunk the implicit normativity of some specific ethical claim will ultimately face the question of what could support claims to normativity in general. Here we find a fertile debate between Humeans, who seek to ground practical normativity in instrumental rationality, and Kantians, who argue that practical reason necessarily includes formal constraints that extend beyond means/end coherence.

Philosophical discussion of normativity is by no means restricted to ethics, however. Epistemology has an irreducibly normative aspect, in so far as it is concerned with norms for belief. And the idea that meaning is implicitly normative has sparked some of the most exciting discussions in recent philosophy of language.
Ethics and Literature
Authors: Mulhall Stephen
Published: September 2018

Moral philosophers typically assume that literary texts have no significance for ethical reflection beyond providing one possible source of examples of moral problems. This is in line with philosophy’s long-standing hostility towards literature; it is described as an ancient quarrel even by Plato, whose expulsion of the poets from his republic is often cited as a founding gesture of the discipline. However, some recent writers on ethics contest this assumption. Neo-Aristotelian theorists see the novel as a medium in which their approach finds its most suitable expression. Proponents of moral perfectionism see literary techniques as indispensable in achieving their desired relation to their readers. Others of no particular theoretical affiliation see literary texts as exemplifying the internal relation of reason to imagination, feeling and sensibility in fundamental modes of moral thought. Taken as a whole, these arguments suggest that a moral philosopher’s evaluation of the ethical significance of literature reveals fundamental features of their conception of ethics in general, of the relation between moral philosophy and other philosophical concerns or questions, and hence of philosophy itself.
Inviolability
Authors: Kamm Frances
Published: September 2018

Inviolability is a status an entity has when it is impermissible to harm it in certain respects. Inviolability can come in degrees and vary with the characteristics of an individual and in the manner in which we might violate that individual. Aggressors, for example, might not be as inviolable as others, and it may even be permissible to violate innocent, non-threatening individuals in certain ways. The impermissibility of violating someone is based not merely on its being a bad state of affairs for someone to be violated, since someone’s inviolability could make it wrong to violate them even in order to stop worse violations of others. Hence inviolability could interfere with the project of maximizing good outcomes. Still, the good of being an individual of high inviolability is retained by each person – including those who are violated because it is impermissible to violate someone else in order to save them – only if it is impermissible to violate someone in order to produce certain good outcomes. It is possible that someone’s permission, and also agreements made in advance to reduce one’s chance of being violated, could make a violation permissible that would otherwise not be permissible. It is sometimes thought that the historical roots of the idea of inviolability lie in the Kantian idea that persons are to be treated as ends in themselves and not merely as means, but it is not clear that this is so.
Frege–Geach problem
Authors: Schroeder Mark
Published: September 2018

The Frege–Geach problem is an important and well-known obstacle to metaethical theories belonging to the broadly noncognitivist tradition, including emotivism, prescriptivism and expressivism. It is also sometimes called the embedding problem, the Frege–Geach–Searle problem or the problem of unasserted contexts.

Theories in the noncognitivist tradition share the view that the distinctive meaning of moral words does not concern what they are about, and it either does not require or is not exhausted by any answer to what makes moral sentences true. For example, according to A. J. Ayer, the word ‘wrong’ works more like ‘dammit’ than like ‘common’, so that ‘stealing money is wrong’ means something more like, ‘dammit, stealing money!’ than like ‘stealing money is common’. But standard ways of understanding the meanings of complex sentences, and of understanding the logical relationships between sentences, depend on an answer to what those sentences are about, or what would make them true. So noncognitivists need a different, nonstandard, answer to how the meanings of simple sentences give rise to the meanings of complex sentences. The problem of how to do so, and of whether it can even be done, has come to be known as the Frege–Geach problem.
Moral fictionalism
Authors: Nolan Daniel
Published: September 2018

Moral fictionalism is the doctrine that the moral claims we accept should be treated as convenient fictions. One standard kind of moral fictionalism maintains that many of the moral claims we ordinarily accept are in fact false, but these claims are still useful to produce and accept, despite this falsehood.

Moral fictionalists claim they can recover many of the benefits of the use of moral concepts and moral language, without the theoretical costs incurred by rivals such as moral realism or traditional moral noncognitivism. These benefits might include social benefits, like being able to resolve conflict peacefully, or psychological benefits for individuals, like resisting temptations that would be harmful.
Moral epistemology
Authors: Wedgwood Ralph
Published: September 2018

Epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. So moral epistemology is the study of what would be involved in knowing, or being justified in believing, moral propositions. Some discussions of moral epistemology interpret the category of ‘moral propositions’ broadly, to encompass all propositions that can be expressed with terms like ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or ‘ought’. Other discussions have focused on a narrower category of moral propositions – such as propositions about what rights people have, or about what we owe to each other.

According to so-called noncognitivists, one cannot strictly speaking know (or be justified in believing) a moral proposition in the same sense in which one can know (or be justified in believing) an ordinary factual proposition. Other philosophers defend a cognitivist position, according to which it is possible to know or be justified in believing moral propositions in the very same sense as factual propositions.

If one does know any moral propositions, they must presumably be true; and the way in which one knows those moral truths must provide access to them. This has led to a debate about whether one could ever know moral truths if a realist conception of these truths – according to which moral truths are not in any interesting sense of our making – were correct.

Many philosophers agree that one way of obtaining justified moral beliefs involves seeking ‘reflective equilibrium’ – that is, roughly, considering theories, and adjusting one’s judgments to make them as systematic and coherent as possible.

According to some philosophers, however, seeking reflective equilibrium is not enough: justified moral beliefs need to be supported by moral ‘intuitions’. Some hold that such moral intuitions are a priori, akin to our intuitions of the self-evident truths of mathematics. Others hold that these intuitions are closely related to emotions or sentiments; some theorists claim that empirical studies of moral psychology strongly support this ‘sentimentalist’ interpretation.

Finally, moral thinking seems different from other areas of thought in two respects. First, there is particularly widespread disagreement about moral questions; and one rarely responds to such moral disagreement by retreating to a state of uncertainty as one does on other questions. Secondly, one rarely defers to other people’s moral judgments in the way in which one defers to experts about ordinary factual questions. These two puzzling features of moral thinking seem to

demand explanation – which is a further problem that moral epistemology has to solve.
Metaethical theories, hybrid
Authors: Ridge Michael , Köhler Sebastian
Published: September 2018

Hybrid theories in metaethics hold at least one of the following theses: Moral claims express both belief-like and desire-like mental states.Moral judgments are constituted by both belief-like and desire-like components.

This definition is deliberately broad and inclusive, to cover all theories that share a theoretically important aspiration: to accommodate or at least explain away both the belief-like and desire-like features of moral thought and discourse without abandoning a broadly Humean philosophy of mind.

A broadly Humean philosophy of mind subscribes to two claims. First, that belief-like and desire-like states can be sharply distinguished in terms of their respective directions of fit: beliefs have a mind-to-world direction of fit (that is, beliefs aim to accurately represent the world), while desire-like states have a world-to-mind direction of fit (desires aim to have the world aligned with them). Second, that beliefs and desires are distinct existences: for any propositions p and q, believing that p and desiring that q can come apart. There are powerful arguments for this kind of view but, at the same time, moral thought and discourse have both belief-like and desire-like features. Hybrid theories take this appearance seriously and include both belief-like and desire-like elements in their theory at a basic level. In this way, they aim to accommodate or explain away the dual nature of moral judgments without abandoning a Humean philosophy of mind.

Traditionally, philosophers have supposed that moral judgments either a) are just Humean beliefs, and that moral claims express precisely those beliefs (cognitivism) or b) are just Humean desire-like states, and that moral claims express precisely those desire-like states (expressivism). Hybrid theorists are keen to emphasize that this supposition rests on a false dichotomy. Perhaps moral judgments are hybrid states, being partly constituted by beliefs and partly by desire-like states. Even if moral judgments themselves just are beliefs, moral claims might still in some important sense express desire-like states. Either of these ways of breaking free of the traditional debate might better accommodate or explain away the dual nature of moral thought and discourse within a Humean framework. The introduction of hybrid theories does not, however, dissolve the traditional debate completely. There are several theoretical issues on which hybrid theories could have more in common with traditional cognitivism than with traditional expressivism and vice versa. It is therefore useful to distinguish two types of hybrid theory: hybrid cognitivism and hybrid expressivism.
Aesthetic concepts
Authors: Eaton Marcia
Published: September 2018

Aesthetic concepts are the concepts associated with the terms that pick out aesthetic properties referred to in descriptions and evaluations of experiences involving artistic and aesthetic objects and events. The questions (epistemological, psychological, logical and metaphysical) that have been raised about these properties are analogous to those raised about the concepts.

In the eighteenth century, philosophers such as Edmund Burke and David Hume attempted to explain aesthetic concepts such as beauty empirically, by connecting them with physical and psychological responses that typify individuals’ experiences of different kinds of objects and events. Thus they sought a basis for an objectivity of personal reactions. Immanuel Kant insisted that aesthetic concepts are essentially subjective (rooted in personal feelings of pleasure and pain), but argued that they have a kind of objectivity on the grounds that, at the purely aesthetic level, feelings of pleasure and pain are universal responses.

In the twentieth century, philosophers have sometimes returned to a Humean analysis of aesthetic concepts via the human faculty of taste, and have extended this psychological account to try to establish an epistemological or logical uniqueness for aesthetic concepts. Many have argued that although there are no aesthetic laws (for example, ‘All roses are beautiful,’ or ‘If a symphony has four movements and is constructed according to rules of Baroque harmony, it will be pleasing’) aesthetic concepts none the less play a meaningful role in discussion and disputation. Others have argued that aesthetic concepts are not essentially distinguishable from other types of concepts.

Recently theorists have been interested in ways that aesthetic concepts are context-dependent – constructed out of social mores and practices, for example. Their theories often deny that aesthetic concepts can be universal. For example, not only is there no guarantee that the term ‘harmony’ will have the same meaning in different cultures: it may not be used at all.
Art, definition of
Authors: Davies Stephen
Published: September 2018

Many of the earliest definitions of art were probably intended to emphasize salient or important features for an audience already familiar with the concept, rather than to analyse the essence possessed by all art works and only by them. Indeed, it has been argued that art could not be defined any more rigorously, since no immutable essence is observable in its instances. But, on the one hand, this view faces difficulties in explaining the unity of the concept – similarities between them, for example, are insufficient to distinguish works of art from other things. And, on the other, it overlooks the attractive possibility that art is to be defined in terms of a relation between the activities of artists, the products that result and the audiences that receive them.

Two types of definition have come to prominence since the 1970s: the functional and procedural. The former regards something as art only if it serves the function for which we have art, usually said to be that of providing aesthetic experience. The latter regards something as art only if it has been baptized as such through an agent’s application of the appropriate procedures. In the version where the agent takes their authority from their location within an informal institution, the ‘artworld’, proceduralism is known as the institutional theory. These definitional strategies are opposed in practice, if not in theory, because the relevant procedures are sometimes used apart from, or to oppose, the alleged function of art; obviously these theories disagree then about whether the outcome is art.

To take account of art’s historically changing character a definition might take a recursive form, holding that something is art if it stands in an appropriate relation to previous art works: it is the location of an item within accepted art-making traditions that makes it a work of art. Theories developed in the 1980s have often taken this form. They variously see the crucial relation between the piece and the corpus of accepted works as, for example, a matter of the manner in which it is intended to be regarded, or of a shared style, or of its being forged by a particular kind of narrative.
Art and morality
Authors: Tanner Michael
Published: September 2018

A complex set of questions is raised by an examination of the relationship between art and morality. First there is a set of empirical considerations about the effect that works of art have on us – one obviously contentious case is that of pornography. Many would argue that the artistic merits of a work are independent of any attitudes or actions it may lead us to adopt or perform. This claim does not survive scrutiny, however, though there is a distinction to be drawn between artistic value and the value of art as a whole. Though there are no coercive arguments to show that we have to take into account the moral qualities of works of art, it is in practice very difficult to ignore them, especially when the point of the work is insistently moral, or when the work is conspicuously depraved.

There is a long tradition, dating back to Plato, of regarding art with suspicion for its power over our emotions, and much of Western aesthetic theorizing has been a response to Plato’s challenge. The longest-lasting defence justified art in terms of a combination of pleasure and instruction, though the two never hit it off as well as was hoped. In the early nineteenth century a new, more complex account of art was offered, notably by Hegel, in the form of a historicized view in which art is one of the modes by which we come to self-awareness; the emphasis altered from truth to an independently existing reality to truthfulness to our own natures, as we explore them by creating art. Taken into the social sphere, this became a doctrine of the importance of art as an agent of political consciousness, operating in subtle ways to undermine the view of reality imposed on us by the ideologies that hold us captive.
Art, understanding of
Authors: Lyas Colin
Published: September 2018

Art engages the understanding in many ways. Thus, confronted with an allegorical painting such as Van Eyk’s The Marriage of Arnolfini, one might want to understand the significance of the objects it depicts. Similarly, confronted with an obscure poem, such as Eliot’s The Waste Land, one might seek to understand what it means. Sometimes, too, we claim not to understand a work of art, a piece of music, say, when we are unable to derive enjoyment from it because we cannot see how it is organized or hangs together. Sometimes what challenges the understanding goes deeper, as when we ask why some things, including such notorious productions of the avant garde as the urinal exhibited by Marcel Duchamp, are called art at all. Some have also claimed that to understand a work of art we must understand its context. Sometimes the context referred to is that of the particular problems and aims of the individual artist in a certain tradition, as when the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields is understood as a contribution by its architect to the vexing problem of combining a tower with a classical façade. Sometimes the context is social, as when some Marxists argue that works of art can best be understood as reflections of the more or less inadequate economic organizations of the societies that gave rise to them. The understanding of art becomes a philosophical problem because, first, it is sometimes thought that one of the central tasks of interpretation is to understand the meaning of a work. However, recent writers, notably Derrida (1972), query the notion of the meaning of a work as something to be definitively deciphered, and offer the alternative view of interpretation as an unending play with the infinitely varied meanings of the text. Second, a controversial issue has been the extent to which the judgment of works of art can be divorced from an understanding of the circumstances, both individual and cultural, of their making. Thus Clive Bell argued that to appreciate a work of art we need nothing more than a knowledge of its colours, shapes and spatial arrangements. Others, ranging from Wittgenstein to Marxists, have for a variety of different reasons argued that a work of art cannot be properly understood and appreciated without some understanding of its relation to the context of its creation, a view famously characterized by Beardsley and Wimsatt (1954) as the ‘genetic fallacy’.
Art, value of
Authors: Budd Malcolm
Published: September 2018

Art has as many kinds of value as there are points of view from which it can be evaluated. Moreover, the benefits of art vary with the role of the participant, for there are benefits that are specific to the creation, the performance and the mere appreciation of art. But in the philosophy of art one value is basic, namely the distinctive value of a work of art, its value as a work of art, which can be called its ‘artistic value’. This value is intrinsic to a work in that it is determined by the intrinsic, rather than the instrumental, value of an informed experience of it, an experience of it in which it is understood. Artistic value is a matter of degree, but it is not a measurable quantity, and whether one work is better than another may be an indeterminate issue. A judgment about a work’s artistic value claims validity, rightly or wrongly, not merely for the person who makes the judgment but for everyone. Both David Hume and Immanuel Kant tried to show how such a claim could be well-founded, but their attempts are usually considered failures, and there is no accepted solution to the problem they addressed. Many philosophers have been concerned with the relation between artistic value and other values. The most famous attack on art, founded on its supposed relation to other values, was made by Plato, who claimed that nearly all art has undesirable social consequences and so should be excluded from a decent society. Plato overlooked many possibilities, however, and the question of art’s beneficial or harmful influence is a much more complex issue than he recognized.
Art works, ontology of
Authors: Currie Gregory
Published: September 2018

In trying to decide what kinds of thing art works are, the most natural starting point is the hypothesis that they are physical objects. This is plausible only for certain works, such as paintings and sculptures; in such cases we say that the work is a certain marked canvas or piece of stone. Even for these apparently favourable cases, though, there is a metaphysical objection to this proposal: that works and the physical objects identified with them do not possess the same properties and so cannot be identical. There is also an aesthetic objection: that the plausibility of the thesis for painting and sculpture rests on the false view that the authentic object made by the artist possesses aesthetically relevant features which no copy could possibly exemplify. Once it is acknowledged that paintings and sculptures are, in principle, reproducible in the way that novels and musical scores are, the motivation for thinking of the authentic canvas or stone as the work itself collapses.

For literary and musical works, the standard view is that they are structures: structures of word-types in the literary case and of sound-types in the musical case. This structuralist view is opposed by contextualism, which asserts that the identity conditions for works must take into account historical features involving their origin and modes of production. Contextualists claim that works with the same structure might have different historical features and ought, therefore, to count as distinct works.

Nelson Goodman (1981) has proposed that we divide works into autographic and allographic kinds; for autographic works, such as paintings, genuineness is determined partly by history of production: for allographic works, such as novels, it is determined in some other way. Our examination of the hypothesis that certain works are physical objects and our discussion of the structuralist/contextualist controversy will indicate grounds for thinking that Goodman’s distinction does not provide an acceptable categorization of works.

A wholly successful ontology of art works would tell us what things are art works and what things are not; failing that, it would give us identity conditions for them, enabling us to say under what conditions this work and that are the same work. Since the complexity of the issues to be discussed quickly ramifies, it will be appropriate after a certain point to consider only the question of identity conditions. For simplicity, this entry concentrates on works of art that exemplify written literature, scored music and the plastic and pictorial arts.
Beauty
Authors: Brown John H.
Published: September 2018

On the subject of beauty, theorists generally agree only on rudimentary points about the term: that it commends on aesthetic grounds, has absolute and comparative forms, and so forth. Beyond this, dispute prevails. Realists hold that judgments of beauty ascribe to their subjects either a nonrelational property inherent in things or a capacity of things to affect respondents in a way that preserves objectivity. In both cases acute problems arise in defining the property and in explaining how it can be known. Classical Platonism holds that beauty exists as an ideal supersensible Form, while eighteenth-century theorists view it as a quasi-sensory property. Kant’s transcendental philosophy anchors the experience of beauty to the basic requirements of cognition, conferring on it ‘subjective universality and necessity’. Sceptics complain that the alleged property is merely a reflection of aesthetic pleasure and hence lacks objective standing. Partly due to its preoccupation with weightier matters, the philosophic tradition has never developed any theory of beauty as fully and deeply as it has, say, theories in the domain of morality. Comparative neglect of the subject has been encouraged by the generally subjectivistic and relativistic bent of the social sciences and humanities, as well as by avant-gardism in the arts. However, several recent and ambitious studies have given new impetus to theorizing about beauty.