It’s job application season right now in philosophy, so I was curious how each AOS was fairing on the job market. While looking on PhilJobs, I happened to come across a job ad for not one, not two, but three open rank tenure-track positions in the same department. The AOS on the ad is listed as “1) Philosophy and AI and/or 2) Value Theory”. You can see the full description below:

My first thought when reading this was “I could have sworn there was one more topic in value theory.” I am thinking here, of course, of aesthetics. Perhaps this is just further evidence of the ‘crisis in aesthetics’. The crisis being that there aren’t any jobs for philosophers who specialize in aesthetics. This is nothing new though. For instance, I was told repeatedly not to focus on aesthetics throughout my M.A. and Ph.D., and by many people (and some would say for good reason). This advice has become bog standard. However, this doesn’t strike me as akin to the jobs problem facing all philosophers, where the solution to the problem is a matter outside of the control of philosophy departments. Philosophers could easily solve this problem, and it seems to me that we should.

When the ‘crisis in aesthetics’ post appeared on The Philosophers’ Cocoon back in April, the comments seemed to range from arguing that it’s not clear why it should be solved to arguing that there is no way to solve it. It’s just not a core area of philosophy after all. A department might put up a job ad because, for instance, they have particular teaching needs in ethics. The fact of the matter is that they simply don’t have teaching needs in aesthetics. To this I ask, why does your department have teaching needs in ethics and not aesthetics? I would venture to guess that it is, in no small part, because your undergrad degree program mandates that ethics is a required philosophy course and aesthetics is a philosophy elective course. This is, of course, going to cook the books in favor of ethics. Why should students enroll in an aesthetics course they don’t need in favor of an ethics course they do need? The fact that they follow the degree program doesn’t tell us anything about what they would choose in the absence of such requirements. I might be biased, but its hard for me to imagine an undergraduate metaethics course consistently coming out on top over a philosophy of horror course if they were forced to compete on a level playing field. To my knowledge, there is no department where this contest for enrollment has ever actually been allowed to happen fairly. It might be that grad students are more interested in metaethics than philosophy of horror (and it might not). This would hardly be surprising since 1) it is what they have been exposed to and 2) the incentive structure of hiring pushes them to cultivate one interest and not the other. If departments sought out aestheticians and put aesthetics and ethics on an equal playing field, perhaps it would be the other way around (if grad students' level of interest even is different between the two).

The fact of the matter is that departments get to decide what their degree requirements are and must justify downgrading aesthetics in favor of ethics and the rest of the so-called 'core areas'. Their continuing to do so, by keeping their degree requirements as they are, is an endorsement of this relative valuation. That it has been that way for some time is not a justification for failing to cover a main area of philosophy, and it’s not obvious to me that we should regard one as core and the other as not. After all, Kant wrote about aesthetics as well, he wasn’t just an ethicist. Perhaps ethics seems ‘more core’ to you, but why? Aristotle wrote about genre but never wrote about shmagency, water being XYZ, or fake barn country. The intuition that some people have, that aesthetics isn’t core, might merely be the result of the fact that you were required to take ethics courses and not aesthetics courses. This is to say that we know that aesthetics isn't core because it’s not a requirement, and we don’t require it because it’s not core. We get the sense that ethics is more central because we have decided that it is, but on what basis did we decide that? Do we still feel that way? Ought we feel that way? On what basis did we decide that for political and social philosophy? Why is there a crisis in aesthetics but not in philosophy of language or science if none are core enough? 

The ethicist might answer that the stakes of ethics are quite high. We ought to hire more ethicists because the topic is of dire importance. It’s a matter of life and death after all! Sure, the things that ethicists talk about are often important, but their talking about them may not be. The claim that moral philosophy is pressing research seems to depend on the controversial claim that ethicists’ work has an impact. That may or may not be true. This says nothing of the fact that metaethics seems to be a free-rider on the 'pressing-ness' coattails of applied ethics. Is the project of evaluating the relative merits of internalism about moral motivation pressing? Is it a matter of life and death? I don’t mean to single out ethics or metaethics, but the comparison is raised by the characterization of value theory in the job ad above. The fact of the matter is that almost all of the work that individual philosophers are doing is equally pressing (that is not very pressing at all). Even if it turns out that ethics is especially important, we would still need to justify why aesthetics is less important than the rest of the so-called ‘core areas’ (like epistemology and metaphysics) and less important than other applied areas that we don't spend so much time and effort advising grad students to shy away from.

Perhaps, though, your department’s teaching needs in ethics are the result of the nonmajors who enroll in Introduction to Ethics because of degree requirements imposed by outside departments. Business degrees require ethics courses, but they don’t require aesthetics courses. There’s nothing we can do to change that! Notice, however, that this is an introductory service course. Non-specialists and those with only an M.A. are routinely expected to teach courses like this at community colleges and as adjuncts without having done a dissertation on the topic. All philosophers should be prepared and willing to teach any service course (whether that is introductory ethics, Introduction to Philosophy, or Introduction to Logic). Why not hire an aesthetician to cover Introduction to Ethics? If they seem unqualified, simply consider the fact that departments routinely think that ethicists who merely dabble in aesthetics are qualified to teach aesthetics. Aestheticians who dabble in ethics are, if anything, more qualified to teach ethics than ethicists who dabble in aesthetics are to teach aesthetics. Why? Us aestheticians have been forced at every step throughout our education to take ethics courses! Ethicists have never been forced to take aesthetics courses in order to complete their degree. Presumably this requirement was to ensure a basic competency in the event that we need to teach ethics courses, but then why not let us do that? This is to say nothing of the additional qualifications that go with working on ethics and art or social and political issues in art. Plenty of people work on these issues from within philosophy of art and have fascinating and important things to say about them. Can the ethicist who has taken (at most) one course in aesthetics and may not have ever published in aesthetics or attended an ASA conference say they have thought as much about art as these aestheticians have about their topic? The same comparison could be made between aestheticians working on art ontology and metaphysicians.

Sure, you say, aestheticians can teach lower-level ethics courses, and our demands for teaching upper-level ethics courses are the result of our own contrivances and might as well be the other way around, but why care? What positive reason do we have to go out of our way to ensure coverage in philosophy of art? As I write, hiring committees for open/open job ads are faced with the terrible decision of having to choose between 1) supporting and hiring someone working in a historically core area of philosophy that (for instance) Kant and Aristotle wrote about and 2) succumbing to the temptation to hire a candidate that works on some flashy applied area of philosophy, relating to a $870 billion a year industry, and that young undergrad students find exciting and relatable. Many departments appear to have opted for the second option (judging by the preponderance of philosophy of AI job ads this round, like the one above). Unfortunately, the size of the AI industry is only half of that worldwide. The $870 billion a year number is actually the size of the arts and culture sector in the U.S. alone. So, for my money, I would just choose to satisfy 1 and 2 at the same time by hiring an aesthetician.  

What can we do to fix the 'crisis in aesthetics'? We could put aesthetics on an equal playing field in our degree requirements with the rest of the core areas of philosophy, we could hire aestheticians to open/open positions, and we could evaluate whether we really need the specialists we claim to need for teaching purposes. We might decide that all core areas (including aesthetics) should be a requirement, or we might just say that the requirement ought to be that students take a course (or courses) in value theory and let them choose between the two. Even if this is a bridge too far for you (though I am not sure why), we could and should still hire more aestheticians. If you keep those degree requirements, aestheticians are more than willing to teach them while researching aesthetics. Why should we do this? Because it is a historically core area of philosophy in which a ton of interesting work is happening. Because it is an applied area of philosophy that young students find relatable and exciting and which relates to a massive part of our economy. Because, frankly, aestheticians have been kind to not make you feel embarrassed for not having a specialist the way that other core areas would. A department's lack of coverage in philosophy of art is, to use an aesthetic term, cringe. I can't think of a good reason not to regard it as a massive oversight the same way we would not having an ethicist. One big step towards solving the crisis in aesthetics would be to simply expect an explanation for why a department has so many redundant specialists in other core areas and none in aesthetics. Departments feel social pressure from the field to ensure coverage in ancient, modern, and ethics, and the same kind of pressure seems justified in this case. We might even go further, in wondering what is stopping any given department from being the Pitt of aesthetics and starting a program in History and Philosophy of Art, but I won't press my luck.

The thing that stands out to me the most about the job ad above isn’t that it enumerates all of the areas of value theory other than aesthetics. This is just making explicit what is left unspoken on the job market most of the time and in most departments. 'We said we were open, but hold on, we're not that open.' The same is often true of generalist journals, which may be open to submissions from any core area of philosophy (but appear not to be that open). The thing I actually find most strange about the job ad above is that this is an ad for 3 separate positions! Are we to believe that the department’s teaching needs in the rest of value theory aren’t satisfied by one or two more ethicists, but require three? There are that many upper level and graduate ethics courses needing specialist instructors? This is a department whose website already boasts 3 ethicists and a political philosopher but no aestheticians. Is a philosophy department best served by having 6 permanent jobs for two thirds of value theory and none for the last third? Is that the greatest good for the field? Again, I may be biased, but I don’t think so. For what it’s worth, the field seems to agree with them and not me. They would certainly seem to be the experts on what is good though. After all, they work in value theory and I don’t.