It has become increasingly common for philosophers to make use of the concept of artistic value, and, further, to distinguish artistic value from aesthetic value. In a recent paper, ‘The Myth of (Non‐Aesthetic) Artistic Value’, Dominic Lopes takes issue with this, presenting a kind of corrective to current philosophical practice regarding the use of the concept of artistic value. Here I am concerned to defend current practice against Lopes's attack. I argue that there is some unclarity as to what aspect of this practice Lopes is objecting to, and I distinguish three kinds of objection that he could be read as making. I argue that none of these is adequately supported by Lopes's arguments, and that the corresponding three aspects of current philosophical practice are on firmer footing than Lopes's paper suggests. A new, plausible characterisation of artistic value will emerge from this discussion.

Many people accept, at least implicitly, what I call the asymmetry claim: the view that moral realism is more defensible than aesthetic realism. This article challenges the asymmetry claim. I argue that it is surprisingly hard to find points of contrast between the two domains that could justify their very different treatment with respect to realism. I consider five potentially promising ways to do this, and I argue that all of them fail. If I am right, those who accept the asymmetry claim have a significant burden of proof. * I would like to thank Chris Cowie, Guy Fletcher, and Bob Stecker for helpful comments on earlier drafts. I am also grateful to audiences at the University of Leeds in 2014, the Humane Philosophy and the Arts Conference in Oxford in 2014, and the Realism and Antirealism in Metaethics and Aesthetics Conference in Cambridge in 2014, as well as to two anonymous referees and various associate editors at Ethics.

There is a substantial literature on evolutionary debunking arguments (EDAs) in metaethics. According to these arguments, evolutionary explanations of our moral beliefs pose a significant problem for moral realism, specifically by committing the realist to an unattractive pessimism about the prospects of our having moral knowledge. In this paper I argue that EDAs exploit an equivocation between two distinct readings of their central claim. One is plausibly true but has no epistemic relevance, and the other would have epistemic consequences for realism, but is false. If I'm right, this undermines attempts to use evolutionary explanations to debunk belief in other domains too.

It is common to distinguish between attributive and predicative goodness. There are good reasons to think that artistic value is a kind of attributive goodness. Surprisingly, however, much debate in philosophical aesthetics has proceeded as though artistic value is a kind of predicative goodness. As I argue, recognizing that artistic value is attributive goodness has important consequences for a number of debates in aesthetics.

The Acquaintance Principle has been the subject of extensive debate in philosophical aesthetics. In one of the most recent developments, it has become popular to claim that some works of conceptual art are counterexamples to it. It is further claimed that this is a genuinely new problem in the sense that it is a problem even for versions of the Acquaintance Principle modified to deal with previous objections. I argue that this is essentially correct; however, the claim as it stands needs some work. I draw attention to, and defend, two assumptions on which the claim rests but which have so far gone unrecognized. I also address an objection that has recently been made to the claim and threatens to raise further complications for it. In doing this, we arrive at a fuller, more robust version of the initial claim.