Abstracts of Published Articles | Phil Papers "Pleasurably Regarding the Pain of Fictional Others" Is it ever bad to take pleasure in the suffering of fictional characters? I think so. I attempt to show when and why. I defend a quasi Moorean view on the issue: It is intrinsically bad to enjoy evil, actual or merely imagined. In support, I offer three thought experiments. Then I present two powerful objections to my view: (1) engaging with fiction is akin to morally unproblematic autonomous fantasy, and (2) since no one is harmed, it is morally unproblematic. I reply to these objections and argue against Moore's claim that it is equally as bad to delight in fictional suffering as it is to enjoy actual suffering. Although I think that it is bad to enjoy imagined suffering, the power of fiction is often mitigating. The moral problems are more often with the works of fiction than with the audience. email for draft "How Not to Defend Response Moralism" Response moralism holds that audience reactions to works of fiction can be morally bad. This position appears implausible: How could it be bad to enjoy fictional suffering? It's just fiction; no one is harmed. My goal is to sketch the most compelling avenue of defense for the theory. I show both how and how not to defend response moralism. First I argue that Allan Hazlett's recent defense fails. Then I defend a Moorean suggestion for how to support the theory. Most important, I argue that the difficulties for the theory have not been fully appreciated. To this end, I present, but do not attempt to solve, four issues facing response moralism. email for draft
"A Life Worth Living" Theories of well-being tell us what makes a life good for the one who lives it. But they do not tell us the entire story about what makes a life worth living. I defend an objective list account of the worth of a life: the most worthwhile lives are those net high in various objective goods. These principally include welfare and meaning. A life worth living (LWL) must pass the pre-existence test—given a synoptic pre-view, a benevolent caretaker should allow one to be born rather than to never have been. A life worth avoiding (LWA) is one that a benevolent caretaker should disallow. We care about the worth of our lives, and we are right to do so. The worth of a life is a reason giving and morally significant kind of value. "Five Tests for What Makes a Life Worth Living" I identify four historically precedented tests for what makes a life worth living: (1) The Suicide Test (Camus), (2) The Recurrence Test (Schopenhauer and Nietzsche), (3) The Extra Life Test (Cicero and Hume), and (4) The Preferring Not to Have Been Test (Job and Williams). I argue that all four fail. In response to Smilansky's objections, I defend a fifth, The Pre-Existence Test for what makes a life worth living: (5) A life worth living is one that a benevolent caretaker with foreknowledge would allow. A life worth avoiding is one that a benevolent caretaker would disallow. I argue that this usefully test tracks the general extension of the concept of what makes a life worth living. I consider three objections and note that there appears to be an indeterminate middle category of lives worth neither. email for draft "Love and Free Will" In this paper, I argue that love would be largely unaffected if we came to deny free will, not simply because we cannot shake the reactive-attitude, but because love is not chosen, nor do we want it to be. Here, I am not alone; others have reached similar conclusions. But the details have yet to be explored. Even if hard determinism is true, not all love is equal. Although we have only minimal control over love, it can more or less authentic. I develop my position by considering the fictional trope of love potions and the implications of a futuristic psychotropic, Lovezac—Viagra for the heart. But I am not as optimistic as some. Even though free will skepticism would not jeopardize love the feeling, there are good reasons to worry that loving relationships would not survive unscathed. download draft "In Defense of the No-Reasons View of Love" I argue that although we can try to explain why we love, we can never justify our love. Love is neither based on reasons, responsive to reasons, nor can it be assessed for normative reasons. Love can be odd, unfortunate, fortuitous, or even sadly lacking, but it can never be fitting or unfitting. We may have reasons to act on our love, but we cannot justify our loving feelings. Shakespeare's Bottom is right: "Reason and love keep little company together now-a-days." Indeed, they keep none and the never kept any: there are no justifying reasons for love. download draft "To Be or Never to Have Been: Anti-Natalism and a Life Worth Living" David Benatar argues that being brought into existence is always a net harm and never a benefit. I disagree. I argue that if you bring someone into existence who lives a life worth living (LWL), then you have not all things considered wronged her. Lives are worth living if they are high in various objective goods and low in objective bads. These lives constitute a net benefit. In contrast, lives worth avoiding (LWA) constitute a net harm. Lives worth avoiding are those that one should decline to live if given a synoptic view before birth. It is the prospect of a LWA that gives us good reason to not bring someone into existence. Happily, many lives are not worth avoiding. Contra Benatar, many are indeed worth living. Even if we grant Benatar his controversial asymmetry thesis, we have no reason to think that coming into existence is always a net harm. download draft "Cinematic" Is cinematicity a virtue in film? Is lack of cinematicity a defect? I think not. I argue that the term 'cinematic' principally refers to some cluster of characteristics found in films featuring the following: expansive scenery, extreme depth of field, high camera positioning, and elaborate tracking shots. We often use the word as a term of praise. And we are likely right to do so. We are right if we mean that the film does well what movies often do well. We are wrong if we mean that the film is good for doing what is merely distinctive of film. Ultimately, I argue that the rightful praise of a film for its cinematicity provides no support for any substantive medium specificity thesis. download draft "Emotional Proportionality: A Problem for Assessing the Appropriateness of Emotions" It is widely assumed that the emotions can be meaningfully evaluated in terms of the normative notion of appropriateness. Much of the discussion has focused on one kind of appropriateness, that of fittingness. An emotional response is appropriate only if it fits its object. For instance, fear only fits dangerous things. There is another dimension of appropriateness that has been relatively ignored—proportionality. For an emotional reaction to be appropriate not only must the object fit, the reaction should be of the appropriate intensity. It should be proportional. The problem for any attempt to develop norms of appropriateness is that proportionality is a factor of how much the person cares about the focus. But, as I argue, it is not clear that care can be normatively assessed. We might be able to say that an emotion is abnormally intense, but normality does not give us normativity. "In Defense of Mental Statism" In this paper I defend a widely rejected theory of well-being, mental statism—the view that the sole bearers of intrinsic prudential value are mental states. The bulk of my effort is spent defending mental statism against a full suite of prominent objections that appear to provide a decisive refutation of the theory: Nozick’s Mongolian pornographer, Nozick’s experience machine, Nagel’s deceived business man, Mill’s swine, and Nagel’s contented infant. I argue that the bulk of the objections confuse different types of value, most typically meaning and well-being. I also provide some positive support for the view, principally through an inversion of the major thought-experiments. "Painful Art and the Limits of Well-Being" My goal in this paper is not so much to defend a solution to the paradox of tragedy, as it is to explore the implications of a few contenders. In particular, I am interested in whether painful art is bad for audiences. And if so, is it rational for people to watch melodramas or to listen to love songs? Should we encourage our loved ones to avoid sad songs? More fundamentally, I am interested in what painful art can tell us about the nature and importance of human welfare. "Against Cognitive Immoralism" Matthew Kieran argues that “a work may be valuable as art in part due to its morally defective aspect.” He calls the position in support of this claim “cognitive immoralism.” Since Kieran offers one of the best defenses of immoralsim about artistic value, I will restrict my discussion to his arguments. This limits the scope of the discussion to a manageable size without sacrificing general significance, since the basic problems with Kieran's argument are applicable to most forms of immoralism. I begin with a explication of the principal claims of cognitive immoralism, before describing Kieran's argument for the position. I then present objections to several major premises in his argument, showing how cognitive immoralism suffers from three fatal problems: Cognitive immoralism lacks a plausible source of artistic value, it fails to provide a mechanism whereby moral flaws could become artistic virtues, and it relies on an excessively permissive notion of what constitutes a moral defect with a work of art. download draft Other Works in Progress "Against Welfarism" (in progress) "On Caring" (in progress) "Is it Better to Like Better Things?" (in progress) "The Recurring Dream Theory of Film" (in progress) "Moral Responsibility for Reactions to Fiction" (in progress) |
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