Obligations to Artworks as Duties of Love

Cross, Anthony

doi:10.33134/eeja.157

Cited by 7 publications

(14 citation statements)

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“…Creators can experience a sense of disloyalty or conflict when they violate their artistic integrity (Mills, 2018), and audiences as well as artists can feel as though they have let themselves down in their aesthetic lives (Kubala, 2018; Moran, 2012). Another response might be to model our relationships to artworks along the lines of our relationships to persons, which are famously characterized by conflicting obligations (Cross, 2017a). The strongest response to Nussbaum, however, would be to develop a clearer picture of the aesthetic reactive attitudes and when they are warranted.…”

Section: Six Quick Argumentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aesthetic obligations

Kubala

2020

Philosophy Compass

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Are there aesthetic obligations, and what would account for their binding force if so? I first develop a general, domain-neutral notion of obligation, then critically discuss six arguments offered for and against the existence of aesthetic obligations. The most serious challenge is that all aesthetic obligations are ultimately grounded in moral norms, and I survey the prospects for this challenge alongside three non-moral views about the source of aesthetic obligations: individual practical identity, social practices, and aesthetic value primitivism. I conclude by raising questions for further work in this area. 1 | INTRODUCTION "I must hear the new Lady Gaga album." "You have to play all the notes." "He shouldn't wear those colors together." "We ought to fund more arts programs." "The moral rights of the author have been asserted." 1 Can sentences like these express genuine normative requirements, or obligations? If so, what could account for their binding force? These are the two major questions about aesthetic obligations: whether there are any and what their source would be if so. Philosophers tend to have two motivations, broadly speaking, for asking these questions. One is defensive, aiming to resist the pervasiveness of the moral. Obligations, and normativity more generally, have historically been theorized primarily in the moral domain, and the fact that its commands seem to have such powerful force implicitly prioritizes morality on the theoretical agenda. If there are aesthetic obligations, then that would put the aesthetic domain on a par with morality, at least in that respect. But this is a dubious motivation, as it is increasingly recognized that-or at least seriously debated whether-obligations can arise in many non-moral normative domains, including etiquette, the law, prudence, and epistemology. 2 And it is in any case possible that moral obligations always defeat non-moral obligations. 3 A better, second motivation is therefore simply to explore the landscape internal to aesthetics as a normative domain, before attempting to make cross-domain comparisons. We might wonder: what kind of aesthetic life do we have most reason to live? 4 To what extent are aesthetic choices even governed by normative considerations? Do any of those considerations ever have the force of obligations? Asking whether there are any aesthetic obligations requires knowing about their alleged contents: what are these purported obligations of or to? One initial possibility to set aside is that aesthetic obligations are obligations of

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Section: Six Quick Argumentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aesthetic obligations

Kubala

2020

Philosophy Compass

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“…81–83. See also Cross, , and Kubala, for more examples of work on the normative importance of personal aesthetic attachments).…”

Section: Objections To Aesthetic Hedonismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aesthetic hedonism and its critics

Berg

2019

Philosophy Compass

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This essay surveys the main objections to aesthetic hedonism, the view that aesthetic value is reducible to the value of aesthetic pleasure or experience. Hedonism is the dominant view of aesthetic value, but a spate of recent criticisms has drawn its accuracy into question. I introduce some distinctions crucial to the criticisms, before using the bulk of the essay to identify and review six major lines of argument that hedonism's critics have employed against it. Whether or not these arguments suffice to refute hedonism decisively, I argue that its privileged status, as the sole contender in aesthetic value theory, is detrimental to downstream research on aesthetic phenomena. The essay concludes with an overview of current work and promising avenues of inquiry into non-hedonic alternatives.

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“…As a result, this approach, unlike Cross's and Kubala's arguably do, does not suggest that the normative requirements that aesthetic objects appear to place on us can have, at best, the status of a veridical hallucinations. For here aesthetic objects 9 For additional discussion see, e.g., Cross 2017 andKubala 2018. themselves give rise to aesthetic obligations, even if we only realize them in virtue of our recognition and affirmation that we are parts of larger harmonious wholes that include those objects. And while aesthetic obligation may be best seen as involving aesthetic objects themselves, rather than distinctively aesthetic features such as their, e.g., beauty, because we realize aesthetic obligations via the recognition and affirmation of objects', e.g., beauty, aesthetic experience is crucial-if not essential-for realizing them.…”

Section: Oneness and Aesthetic Obligation: An Alternative Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One cannot, it would seem, owe anything to, or have a demand placed on them by, e.g., a tree or flower, or an inanimate object like a mountain or painted canvas. Hence, in recent years, variations of b) have received more attention: for example, Anthony Cross (Cross ) argues that aesthetic obligation is a species of self‐obligation incurred in virtue of loving some object, and Robbie Kubala (Kubala ) argues that aesthetic obligation is a species of self‐promising. One consequence of these approaches, however, is that they arguably imply that the normative requirements that aesthetic objects appear to place on us can have, at best, the status of veridical hallucinations.…”

Section: A Problem Concerning Aesthetic Obligationmentioning

confidence: 99%