As aesthetic beings, we are receptive to and engaged with the sensuous phenomena of life while also knowing that we are targets of others’ awareness: we are both aesthetic agents and aesthetic objects. Our psychological health, our standing within our communities, and our overall wellbeing can be profoundly affected by our aesthetic surroundings and by whether and how we receive aesthetic recognition from others. When our embodied selves and our cultural products are valued, and when we have rich opportunities for (...) aesthetic experience and for the exercise of aesthetic agency, the aesthetic can foster and sustain wellbeing and help to make our lives worthwhile. But when we are subjected to aesthetic blight, restriction of our aesthetic agency, and aesthetic devaluing of our embodied selves and our communities’ cultural products, the aesthetic can do great harm: such aesthetic maneuvers play a significant role in oppression and social hierarchy related to race, gender, fatness, and disability. This essay explores the notions of aesthetic objects and aesthetic agents, their relations with each other, and the unique affordances of persons’ status as simultaneously aesthetic objects and aesthetic agents. It examines the prospects for bodily aesthetic experience to promote wellbeing and, at the end, considers how the aesthetic might play a role in establishing forms of mutual vulnerability and recognition to combat oppressive social hierarchies. (shrink)

Recent work by philosophers such as Harry Chalmers and Hallie Liberto has called into question the moral permissibility of monogamy. In this article, I defend monogamy on a number of grounds, including practical reasons and reasons relating to commitment, specialness, and jealousy. I also attempt to reframe the debate about monogamy as not just relating to the permissibility of restricting one’s partner but as equally about one’s freedom to leave a relationship. Finally, I make a case against Liberto’s claim that (...) monogamous agreements are over-extensive. (shrink)

Some writers have objected to cultural appropriation in the arts on the grounds that it violates cultures’ property rights. Recently a paper by Erich Matthes and another by C. Thi Nguyen and Matthew Strohl have argued that cultural appropriation does not violate property rights but that it is nevertheless often objectionable. Matthes argues that cultural appropriation contributes to the oppression of disadvantaged cultures. Nguyen and Strohl argue that it violated the intimacy of cultures. This paper argues that neither Matthes nor (...) Nguyen and Strohl succeed in showing that cultural appropriation is often objectionable. (shrink)

This paper seeks to clear up the confusion surrounding debates over cultural appropriation. To do so, I argue for an agent-centred approach—a focus on appropriators more than appropriation. In my view, cultural misappropriation involves agents who exhibit disregard toward a relevant culture and its members. I argue further that this approach improves upon recent alternative philosophical approaches to cultural appropriation, which I divide into two camps: toleration-based and power-based.

How should we understand the arrogance of groups that do not seem to exhibit group agency? Specifically, how should we understand the putative epistemic arrogance ascribed to men and privileged or powerful groups in cases raised in the extant philosophical literature? Groups like these differ from others that are usually the subject of work on collective vice and virtue insofar as they seem to lack essential features of group agency; they are sub-agential groups. In this article, I ask whether extant (...) summative or anti-summative accounts of collective epistemic vice offer a basis for understanding the structure of the epistemic arrogance of men and the privileged. I argue that a summative formulation and two prominent anti-summative positions fail to adequately account for the structure of group arrogance in such cases. This leaves us lacking an understanding of how sub-agential group arrogance works. To address this, I defend a collectivist account of group arrogance that takes social norms as the determinative basis of group arrogance. (shrink)

Current debates in food aesthetics are moving away from a focus on whether food is art, and worries about the subjectivity and objectivity of taste, and towards questions about food's aesthetic properties, the cultural and social significance of food, our modes of aesthetic engagement with food, and issues involving cultural appropriation and the authenticity of dishes.

Is it ever aesthetically permissible to engage in acts of cultural appropriation? This paper shows how recent work on aesthetic normativity can help answer this question. Drawing on the work of Lopes and McGonigal, I argue that in many cases those who engage in cultural appropriation act against their aesthetic reasons. Lopes and McGonigal advocate for externalist accounts of aesthetic reasons according to which whether or not an agent has an aesthetic reason to act depends on whether or not their (...) action will be an aesthetic achievement. Employing this framework, I argue that insofar as acts of cultural appropriation are seldom aesthetic achievements, many agents who engage in culturally appropriative aesthetic activities act against their aesthetic reasons. (shrink)

Art can be addressed, not just to individuals, but to groups. Art can even be part of how groups think to themselves – how they keep a grip on their values over time. I focus on monuments as a case study. Monuments, I claim, can function as a commitment to a group value, for the sake of long-term action guidance. Art can function here where charters and mission statements cannot, precisely because of art’s powers to capture subtlety and emotion. In (...) particular, art can serve as the vessel for group emotions, by making emotional content sufficiently public so as to be the object of a group commitment. Art enables groups to guide themselves with values too subtle to be codified. (shrink)

Medicalization is the process by which conditions, for example, intellectual disability, hyperactivity in children, and posttraumatic stress disorder, become understood as medical disorders. During this process, the medical community often collectively assigns a label to a condition and consequently to those who would be said to have the disorder. We argue that there are at least two previously overlooked ways in which this linguistic practice may be wrongful, and sometimes, unjust: first, when the initial introduction of a medical label is (...) done without the participation of those individuals who are being labelled, and second, when attempts by those individuals to renegotiate the labels are thwarted or otherwise rendered ineffective. In both cases, we argue, individuals are unfairly excluded from a linguistic practice that would be valuable for them to participate in. Furthermore, we argue that their exclusion depends in part on the authority of the medical institution to ignore their demands for participation. In making this case, we will propose the more general claim that participating in the linguistic processes of determining and renegotiating the words that will be used to describe oneself is an exercise of linguistic agency, a capacity that has both instrumental and intrinsic value. (shrink)

This paper is about style appropriation: the use by someone of stylistic cultural innovations distinctive of a cultural group that is not her own. While I agree with the key insight of C. Thi Nguyen and Matthew Strohl : 981-1002) – namely, that style appropriation is sometimes found objectionable because group intimacy is believed to have been breached – I disagree with their core claim that the settled beliefs of the group cannot be wrong about whether its group intimacy has, (...) in fact, been compromised in this way. I accept that facts about group intimacy can generate normative reasons concerning style appropriation, but develop a distinctive account of how this comes to be so: one which holds that such facts are independently grounded, rather than being decided by group opinion. This alternative picture of how group intimacy grounds normative reasons does better justice to the intuitive thought that reality, including its normative regions, is belief-independent. The paper ends with some replies to potential objections. (shrink)

Work in feminist and critical race aesthetics brings out a complex interaction between aesthetic, ethical, and political value. The interest in ethico-political considerations is also found in recent literature around art and ethics, such as debates about the work of immoral artists, cultural appropriation and heritage, and art in public spaces. These discussions are characterized by a social structural approach to the ethico-political value of art that focuses on relations between artworks, other artefacts, and individuals in specific sociohistorical contexts and (...) as they emerge from specific social organizations. In this paper I present the main features and assumptions behind these social structural approaches to the values of art. I examine accounts that take ethico-political value to depend on artworks’ contributions to public discourse and on their role in constituting social structures. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print. What is cultural ‘appropriation’? What is cultural ‘appreciation’? Whatever the complex answer to this question, cultural appropriation is commonly defined as ‘the taking of something produced by members of one culture by members of another’, whilst appreciation is typically understood as mere ‘exploration’: ‘Appreciation explores whatever is there’. These provisional definitions suggest that there is an in-principle distinction between the two concepts that presupposes the following: what is appreciated is already available; what is (...) appropriated was, prior to its being taken, not already there or available. Moreover, perhaps appreciation, when contrasted to appropriation, is unproblematic precisely due to this basic difference. In this paper, we argue that the exclusive disjunction – appropriation or appreciation – rests on a false distinction between the two. We also show that this distinction presupposes a false normative principle that to the extent that x is appreciation rather than appropriation, then x is not – relevant to this issue – a wrong. Against these presuppositions, we defend the view that appropriation is already built into appreciation. This does not mean that we cannot ask questions of appreciation, but that questions of appreciation do not preclude the problematics of appropriation. (shrink)

What is cultural ‘appropriation’? What is cultural ‘appreciation’? Whatever the complex answer to this question, cultural appropriation is commonly defined as ‘the taking of something produced by members of one culture by members of another’ (Young 2005: 136), whilst appreciation is typically understood as mere ‘exploration’: ‘Appreciation explores whatever is there’. (Gracyk 2007: 112). These provisional definitions suggest that there is an in-principle distinction between the two concepts that presupposes the following: what is appreciated is already available; what is appropriated (...) was, prior to its being taken, not already there or available. Moreover, perhaps appreciation, when contrasted to appropriation, is unproblematic precisely due to this basic difference. In this paper, we argue that the exclusive disjunction – appropriation or appreciation – rests on a false distinction between the two. We also show that this distinction presupposes a false normative principle that to the extent that x is appreciation rather than appropriation, then x is not – relevant to this issue – a wrong. Against these presuppositions, we defend the view that appropriation is already built into appreciation. This does not mean that we cannot ask questions of appreciation, but that questions of appreciation do not preclude the problematics of appropriation. (shrink)

Relying on aesthetic testimony seems problematic. For instance, it seems problematic for me to simply believe or assert that The Velvet Underground's debut album The Velvet Underground and Nico (1964) is amazing solely because you have told me so, even though I know you to be an honest and competent music critic. But why? After all, there do not seem to be similar reservations regarding testimony from many other domains. In this paper, I will argue that relying on aesthetic testimony (...) seems problematic because we are attached to an ideal of aesthetic authenticity and feel that living up to this ideal is anathema to simply relying on aesthetic testimony. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Rima Basu and I have offered separate accounts of wokeness as an anti-racist ethical concept. Our accounts endorse controversial doctrines in epistemology: doxastic wronging, doxastic voluntarism, and moral encroachment. Many philosophers deny these three views, favoring instead some ordinary standards for epistemic justification. I call this denial the standard view. In this paper, I offer an account of wokeness that is consistent with the standard view. I argue that wokeness is best understood as ‘group epistemic partiality’. The woke person (...) does extra epistemic work before forming a negative belief about a member of an oppressed social group. Just as we do extra epistemic work when forming belief about our friends, so the woke person does for members of oppressed social groups. I first outline the account. I then raise questions about the scope of wokeness and belief formation. After this, I demonstrate that the group partiality view is consistent with the standard view in epistemology. The partiality view, therefore, should appeal to epistemologists who have adopted the standard view because it is consistent with ordinary standards of justification. I conclude that wokeness as a concept in epistemology should not be controversial for those who endorse the standard view. (shrink)

The aim of what I propose to call “existential aesthetics” is to investigate the various ways in which art and certain kinds of aesthetic practice or aesthetic experience can be of existential importance to people. Section I provides a definition of existential aesthetics, while Section II delineates this emerging field from cognate areas of research. Sections III and IV explore various subcategories and examples of existential aesthetics. Section V seeks to identify important avenues for future research and Section VI presents (...) some concluding thoughts about the potential of existential aesthetics and why philosophers should be encouraged to fulfill this potential. (shrink)