Article Downloads | Abstracts of Published Articles

"Less Good but not Bad: In Defense of Epicureanism about the Badness of Death"

In this paper I defend innocuousism—a weak form of Epicureanism about the badness of death.  I argue that if we assume both mental statism about well-being and that death is an experiential blank, it follows that death is not bad for the one who dies.  I defend innocuousism against the deprivation account of the badness of death.  I argue that recent defenses of the deprivation account, such as those offered by Fred Feldman and Ben Bradley, rest on a suspect notion of extrinsic badness—a notion that erroneously confuses states of affairs that merely could have been better with those that are bad.  In reply, I defend an alternate account according to which something is extrinsically bad if an only if it leads to states that are intrinsically bad.  On my view, sometimes dying may be less good than living, but it is never bad to die.  

download

"Aristocrats and Inferno Bullets: Two Controversial Claims about Humor and Morality"

Commonsense has it that humor and morality are antithetical: Moral flaws enhance amusement, and moral virtues detract.  I reject both of these claims.  If we distinguish between merely outrageous jokes and immoral jokes, the problems with the commonsense view become apparent.  What we find is that genuine morals flaws tend to inhibit amusement.  Further, by looking at a few satirical news stories from The Onion, we can see that moral virtues sometimes enhance amusement.  The position I defend is known as comic moralism.  It is widely regarded as patently absurd.  I hope to correct this mistake. 

download

"The Power to Make Others Worship"

In this paper I ask a new question about worship: Can any being worthy of worship make others worship it?  By way of an analogy to love, I argue that it is perfectly coherent to think that one could be made to worship.  However, forced worship would be inauthentic—much like love earned though potions.  For this reason, I argue that one cannot be made to worship properly.  My principal claim is that no being worthy of worship could exercise the power to make others worship it, since the act of making another worship would necessarily make one unworthy of worship.  

download

"'Pickman's Model': Horror and the Objective Purport of Photographs"

It is commonly held, even among non-Bazinians, that photographs are typically perceived as more objective than other forms of depiction.  The implications of this putative feature of photographic reception for the fiction film have been relatively ignored.  If photos do have an objective purport, it would explain the power of a common device used in horror movies where a monster is selectively revealed through a degraded image, usually an amateur video recording.  However, I argue that a better explanation is forthcoming.  It is not the objective purport of photographs that accounts for the peculiar power of these scenes, but the power of our imaginations to picture monsters far more terrifying than those that can be readily depicted.  This gives us reason to be skeptical of the idea that the objective purport of photographs contributes significantly to the reception of fiction films.

download

"Immortality and Significance"

Although I reject his argument, I defend Bernard Williams’ claim that we would lose reason to go on if we were to live forever.  Like Williams, I develop my argument through a brief discussion of a work of fiction—in this instance, Borges’ philosophical story “The Immortal.”  I expand on Borges’ example, arguing that immortality would be motivationally devastating, since our decisions would carry little weight, our achievements would be hollow victories of mere diligence, and the prospect of eternal frustration would haunt our every effort.  

download

“The Ghost is the Thing: Can Horror Reveal Audience Beliefs?”

(presented at: American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, December 2007)

Can fictions sometimes reveal important information about what beliefs audience members hold? I argue that a case can be made that emotional responses to some horror fictions can reveal that audiences harbor beliefs in the supernatural, beliefs that audience members might otherwise deny holding. To clarify the terms of the discussion, I begin with an overview of two leading theories of belief: the representational and dispositional accounts. I explore the role of belief in the production of emotional responses by posing a hard question that none of the leading theories answers directly: Why are some fictional scenarios and events so much more effective than others? I argue that the answer has to do with belief, that is, the beliefs about the world that audiences bring to fictions. After laying the groundwork, I argue that cultural differences in audience responses to some horror fictions might be best explained by what supernatural beliefs they hold. After developing the case, I offer several reasons to be skeptical of this conclusion.

download

“Why Pleasure Cannot be Reduced to Desire”

In two recent, provocative articles Chris Heathwood defends a position called the Motivational Theory of Pleasure (MTP). Roughly, the theory is that a sensation is a pleasure if and only if we have a contemporaneous desire that it be occurring for its own sake. In this formulation the MTP implies that pleasure can be reduced to desire, since there is nothing more to being a pleasure than simply being desired in the right way. The MTP seems to be a promising theory of pleasure. If true it solves the heterogeneity problem, explaining the basis for why we call so many disparate kinds of experiences pleasure. In addition, Heathwood's formulation solves several of the major problems facing other desire-based theories of pleasure.

However, the MTP suffers from three independent problems, two of which Heathwood considers but dismisses too quickly. First the MTP relies on excessively general concept of “desire,” one that fails to adequately differentiate wanting from liking. Second, and more importantly, the MTP fails to acknowledge that we can contemporaneously “desire” experiences for their own sake that are not pleasant. Heathwood's reply to this second objection rests on a serious of equivocations moving from “desire” to “liking” to “finding pleasant.” I intend to show that this argument fails to rescue the MTP from the charge of insufficiency. I also present a third objection that is an inverse of the second, namely, we can have non-desired pleasures, which shows that “desire” is not necessary.

"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.

“A Brief Defense of Rationalism"

By focusing on two recent articles on the rationality of fictional emotions, I reveal a previously unnoticed, general problem with all such charges of irrationality. I argue that emotional reactions to fiction should not be thought irrational because we have been given no reason to stop having them. Without reason to do otherwise, we have no reason to think that the fiction-goer is the least bit unresponsive to reasons. Any criteria of rationality should not leave the question open as to why we should be rational. Before we term something irrational, we must have reason to think that we should or would want to do otherwise. No irrationalist has ever given any indication that they can meet this utterly reasonable demand.

“The Strategic Flaw Objection to Moralism about Art”

What we might call the strategic flaw objection claims that although artworks may arouse moral emotions that defeat some aesthetic properties, we have no good reason to consider such flaws moral flaws. According to this objection, artworks are less often morally flawed than we might think. Without a clearly defined mechanism whereby artworks can harm, it is not obvious that they can be morally flawed. Perhaps, such a mechanism might exist, but the burden of proof lies on the moralist's side. Even if an artwork can be morally flawed, the objection continues, why should we think that moral flaws are responsible for aesthetic defects or virtues? For example, why should we suppose that a morally flawed portrayal of a character is responsible for a lack of viewer sympathy, rather than simply inept characterization? Against the first part of this objection, I offer a brief defense of the "ethical vulnerability of art"—the position that artworks can be ethically flawed. I do not attempt an elaborate defense of this claim; instead, I expose the complexity of the issue by sorting out three possible ways in which artworks might cause harm.