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"Grounding Moralism: Moral Flaws and Aesthetic Properties"
(forthcoming, Journal of Aesthetic Education)
My goal in this article is to provide support for the claim that moral flaws can be detrimental to an artwork's aesthetic value. I argue that moral flaws can become aesthetic flaws when they defeat the operation of good-making aesthetic properties. I do not defend a new theory of aesthetic properties or aesthetic value; instead, I attempt to show that on both the response-dependence and the supervenience account of aesthetic properties, moral flaws with an artwork are relevant to what aesthetic properties obtain. I provide a description of the main features of both theories of aesthetic properties, and then explain how moral flaws can become aesthetic flaws on either account. I address several objections to moralism about art including the "moralistic fallacy."
"Film as Philosophy: A Solution to the Problem of Paraphrase"
(forthcoming, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism)
I defend what Paisley Livingston calls the “bold thesis” of cinema as philosophy. As described by Livingston, the bold thesis is that some films can make innovative, independent philosophical contributions by cinematic means. In the abstract, the idea is simply that film can do philosophy in an interesting way. And it is certainly not interesting to point out that a film could be philosophical by simply presenting a philosopher reading a paper. If the film as philosophy thesis has any significance, it must hold that film can do philosophy in a way more “cinematic” than merely recording a talk. In addition, if film can be said to do philosophy, it must be able to make original contributions to the field. The central problem with the bold thesis is that it runs into what Livingston calls the problem of paraphrase. I expand the bold thesis, explain the problem of paraphrase, and proceed to explain how the problem can be solved. Although there may have never been a film that has made an innovative and independent philosophical contribution, and it is certain that few have, there is no reason to think that films cannot do philosophy. By way of the example of October, I argued that films can offer analogical arguments that could be innovative an independent. There is ample reason to think that the film is able to do philosophy independent of linguistic means, and, further, that the means employed, namely the means of montage, are as cinematic as can be.
“The Ethics of Humor: Can Your Sense of Humor be Wrong?”
(forthcoming, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice)
Although few people have focused exclusively on the humor response, we can distill three somewhat interrelated approaches to the ethical criticisms of humor: (1) attitude-based theories, (2) merited-response theories, and (3) emotional responsibility theories. I direct the brunt of my effort at showing the limitations of the attitudinal endorsement theory by presenting new criticisms of Ronald de Sousa's position. I then assess the strengths of the other two approaches, showing that their major formulations implicitly require the problematic attitudinal endorsement theory. In this article, I argue for an effects-mediated responsibility theory, holding that the strongest ethical criticism that can be made of our sense of humor is that it might indicate some omission on our part. This omission could only be culpable in so far as a particular joke could do harm to one's self or others. In contrast to Ted Cohen's doubts that such a mechanism of harm is forthcoming, I argue that the primary vehicle of the harmful effects of humor is laughter.
"Do Moral Flaws Enhance Amusement?"
(forthcoming, American Philosophical Quarterly)
In this paper I argue that genuine moral flaws never enhance amusement, but they sometimes detract.I argue against comic immoralism--the position that moral flaws can make attempts at humor more amusing.Two common errors have made immoralism look attractive.First, immoralists have confused outrageous content with genuine moral flaws.Second, immoralists have failed to see that it is not sufficient to show that a morally flawed joke is amusing; they need to show that a joke can be more amusing because of the fact that it is morally flawed.I argue that the immoralist lacks a plausible account of how this could be the case.I reject immoralism and argue for comic moralism—the position that moral flaws can make attempts at humor less amusing.
"Wings of Desire: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality"
(forthcoming, Film and Philosophy)
The question Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987) forces us to answer is whether we too would be willing to renounce immortality? Or, to put it conversely, would we be wise to exchange our current mortal existence for immortality? If a state of senseless, inefficacious existence is undesirable, the question of the value of immortality becomes one of the conceivably of an alternative to the angels' form of existence. By contemplating the existence of the angels in Wings of Desire, we can see that they do not simply exemplify one possible eternal existence, but that the negative aspects of their being are perhaps essential features of the immortal. I begin by exploring another argument for the undesirableness of immortality that has taken center stage in the debate, then turn my attention to the film and present a novel argument against the value of immortality.
“Story Identity, Story Type”
(Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism)
A foundational assumption, perhaps the initial discovery, of narrative theory is that a distinction can be made between story and discourse—between the plot and how it is told. It seems clear that the Wooster Group's production of “Hamlet” tells the same story as Laurence Olivier's production. When we say that these two productions have the same story, we mean to say that the stories are identical. However, our meaning is not so clear in other contexts. Critics claims that “Pretty Woman” is a Pygmalion story and that “Maid in Manhattan” is a Cinderella story, but we should not understand such comments as expressing identity claims. Instead, the critics are assigning a property to the movie, or perhaps classifying the story type—that is, they are using the “is” of predication rather than the “is” of identity. If pressed, surely, we would not want to say that “Maid in Manhattan” and Disney's animated Cinderella have identical stories, or are tellings of the same story.
Although it seems plausible to say that the same story can be retold in different media, it is difficult to say exactly what this would entail. The primary difficulty is in coming up with an acceptable theory of story identity. In this article I present several theories of story identity and explore their weaknesses. I argue that in the end we are left with two unattractive options: a strict theory that implies that the same story can almost never be retold and a lenient theory that has trouble differentiating between a general story type and the same story.
"'The Little People': Power and the Worshipable"
(The Twilight Zone and Philosophy)
Philosophers and social scientists have explored the ritual practices and the experience of worship, but there has been relatively little discussion of what makes something worthy of worship.However, we find a characteristically sophisticated examination of the issue by Rod Serling in the Twilight Zone episode "The Little People" (3rd Season, March 30, 1962). By considering the example of “The Little People” and a few variations, we can clarify the role power plays in making something worthy of worship. The episode presents a scenario where a relative, although great, advantage in strength is not sufficient to make something worshipable. But what of far greater powers, such as that of creating the universe—is such power sufficient? If not sufficient, is great power necessary for something to be worthy of worship? Does omnipotence impart the bearer with the power to make others properly worship it?
“What is Interactivity?”
(forthcoming, Journal of Aesthetic Education)
I argue that the term "interactive" should be considered a general purpose term that indicates something about whatever it is applied to, whether that is art, artifact, or nature. I base my definition in the notion of "interacting with" something. First, I look for essential features of this relation, and then using these features I develop a notion of interactivity that can help distinguish the interactive from non-interactive arts. Although I am skeptical of the benefits interactivity affords, interactive artworks are significant in that they are the first instances of mass art to be truly "concreative." Prior to building a definition of interactivity, I provide a novel reading of Collingwood in order to revive his notion of "concreativity" for contemporary application. In order to develop my theory of interactivity as mutual responsiveness, I analyze four problematic definitions of interactivity: (1) the control theory, (2) the making use theory, (3) the input/output theory, and (4) the procedural/participatory theory. In each case, I reveal a problem that my final notion solves. After presenting a definition of interactivity, I defend the viability of my theory against skeptical remarks that interactivity is a useless concept.
"The Desire-Frustration Theory of Suspense"
(Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism)
What is suspense and how is it created? An answer to this question constitutes a theory of suspense. I propose that any theory of suspense needs to be able to account for three curious features:
Suspense is seldom felt in our daily lives, but frequently felt in response to works of fiction and other narrative artworks. (Narrative Imbalance)
It is widely thought that suspense requires uncertainty, but we often feel suspense in response to narratives when we have knowledge of the outcome. (Paradox of Suspense)
The amount of suspense felt in response to a narrative typically diminishes on repeated encounters. (Diminishing Returns)
In this paper I offer a theory of suspense that can explain these three features. I argue for a theory called the Desire-Frustration Theory of Suspense, which holds that suspense results when our desire to effect the outcome of an imminent event is frustrated.
"The Paradox of Painful Art"
(Journal of Aesthetic Education)
Many of the most popular genres of narrative art are designed to elicit negative emotions: emotions that are experienced as painful or involving some degree of pain, which we generally avoid in our daily lives. Melodramas make us cry. Tragedies bring forth pity and fear. Conspiratorial thrillers arouse feelings of hopelessness and dread, and devotional religious art can make the believer weep in sorrow: not only do audiences know what these artworks are supposed to do, they seek them out in pursuit of prima facie painful reactions. Traditionally, the question of why people seek out such experiences of painful art has been presented as the paradox of tragedy. Most solutions to the paradox of tragedy assume that the reason we seek out tragedies, horror films, melodramas, and the like is because they afford pleasureful experiences. From there, theorists attempt to account for the source of this pleasure, a pleasure assumed to be had from representations of events from which we do not derive pleasure in real life. I argue that this assumption is suspect: the motive for seeking out devotional religious art, melodrama, tragedy, and some horror is not clearly to find pleasure.
“The Joke is the Thing: 'In the Company of Men' and the Ethics of Humor”
Any analysis of In the Company of Men is forced to answer three questions of central importance to the ethics of humor: (1) What does it mean to find sexist humor funny? (2) What are the various sources of humor? And, (3) can moral flaws with attempts at humor increase their humorousness? Although In the Company of Men may get at the conscience of the audience through humor, the mechanism is not the content but the purpose to which the jokes are put. By examining the way in which humor is used in the film, I hope to reveal what the film has to tell us about the ethics of humor. This paper argues that the film exposes a source of humor, namely, insecurity, which has been largely unaccounted for and is at radical variance with the superiority theory of humor. In addition, I argue that the film shows that comic immoralism lacks clear support, since it demonstrates how certain kinds of jokes fail to work in truly immoral contexts.
“Are Video Games Art?”
Typically, one advances the art status of a particular artform in a deductive fashion: by first picking a favored definition of art, demonstrating that the candidate meets all the criteria for sufficiency according to that definition, and then concluding that the artform in question is art. Rather than defining art and defending video games based on a contentious definition, I offer reasons for thinking video games can be art on institutional, historical, representational, and expressivist grounds. If we can agree that all of these definitions generally track our intuitions about what should be considered art, when they are all in agreement we have good reason to think that we have successfully picked out an artform.
“V. F. Perkins Functional Credibility and the Problem of Imaginative Resistance”
I identify three seemingly incompatible notions of credibility and show how Perkins trades on an ambiguity between them. I attempt to bring the three notions together into an idea of functional credibility, but find that this notion has a limited scope. Not only is the concept difficult to apply, seemingly amounting to anything but a clarification of standards, but the application blindly rules out cases of acknowledged excellence. Perkins leaves the value of spectator immersion, and why it should be, relatively unsupported. As a result, the composite notion works against Perkins' statement of intent. Rather than criteria of evaluation, Perkins has presented us with a rough analysis of the power of convention, and how it relates to a vague notion of belief required for spectator immersion. Nevertheless, Film as Film exposes the complexity of the problem of imaginative resistance in regard to the art of the moving image.
“Helpless Spectators: Suspense in Film and Video Games”
(Text Technology)
The most surprising conclusion of our analysis is that videogames can be most effective in generating suspense not by highlighting their unique ability to be interactive, but, to the contrary, limiting interactivity at key points, thereby turning players into helpless spectators like those that watch films. Discovering this technique in video games allows us to turn our attention back to film, where we are able to highlight a previously ignored feature of viewer film interaction, namely, helplessness.
“Anesthetic Experience”
While working to build his aesthetic theory from the qualities of normal, healthy experience, John Dewey diagnoses a rarely recognized experiential ailment -- what might be called the anesthetic malady. This illness generally results when experience is deprived of meaning due to the poverty of the predominant forms of activity available in one's environment. In Dewey's theory of aesthetic experience lies an easily overlooked social/political approach that predates, by almost half a century, recent social theoretical concerns in phenomenology and everyday aesthetics. Dewey takes notice of experience and prompts inquiry into sometimes obviously important, but often dismissed as irrelevant and mundane, paths.
“Haunting the House from Within”
In this article I attempt to explain the lasting effectiveness and critical success of The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963) by roughly sketching the role that 'belief' might play in a revised version of the 'Thought Theory' of emotional response. I argue that The Haunting engages the viewer in a process of "disbelief mitigation" -- the sheltering of non-trivial, tenuously held beliefs required for optimal viewer response -- that helps make the film work as horror, and prevents it from sliding into comedy. Haunted house films do not have to extend much effort to keep us from walking away, since viewers come to the theater ready to entertain the idea that haunted houses exist. Using the experiential philosophy of John Dewey, I propose that this willingness has to do with a fundamental aspect of our relationship with space. It is common to speak of places as charged or tense, to get feelings of dread or nostalgia from certain spots. Some haunted house films make use of this experiential characteristic to fuel the horror, and without it the subgenre would probably not exist.