Abstract
Moral properties such as being wrong or being obligatory are not brute but based on other kinds of properties, such as being a lie or being promised. Aesthetic properties such as being graceful or being beautiful are similar to moral properties in being based on other kinds of properties, but in the aesthetic cases it may be impossible to specify just what these grounding properties are. Does any single property ground poetic beauty in the way promising grounds obligation to do the promised deed? If aesthetic properties do differ from moral properties in this way, may we conclude that, although ethics is like aesthetics in being a realm of intuitive and perceptual knowledge—or at least intuitive and perceptual sensitivity—it is unlike aesthetics because the latter lacks principles that connect grounding properties with aesthetic properties? Are there any such generalities in aesthetics, or even aesthetic generalities connecting aesthetic properties with other aesthetic properties? If there are, how much like or unlike rules and principles in ethics are they? This paper explores all these questions in the light of examples from the arts, with poetry as the main case study.
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Notes
This kind of determination relation is characteristic of what metaphysicians call grounding. For explication of grounding, see Audi (2012).
This distinction will be clarified in Sec II in the discussion of cognitive penetration; but a main point is that the value of an experience need not be limited to any one kind of good-making property experienced therein.
This distinction is developed in Audi (2013a). I presuppose that there is a way to conceive promising that captures its implication of commitment in non-moral terms, such as expressing intentions of a special kind. I see no reason why a similar distinction cannot be made in aesthetics, but here I simply want to block the assumption that there is no sense in which a natural property of the kind that grounds a normative one cannot itself be normative.
This is partly why Sidgwick (1907) held that ordinarily people should be guided by everyday moral principles rather than the principle of utility, even though it is their ground. Might not the same kind of caution hold for Kantian ethics?
Ultimately because a normative property, say moral turpitude, could in a certain kind of literary work be a ground of ugliness, yet would itself be grounded in non-normative properties. This presupposes that consequentiality is transitive, but that is highly plausible and seems obvious for determination.
There may be an element of relativity here, esp. for singability. But what applies only to certain kinds of perceivers is not thereby unimportant. Perhaps, however, singability as a criterion for melodies is universal as well as relative: applying to any being capable of appreciatively experiencing singing and of carrying a tune at least subvocally.
Here one might think of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Inversnaid,” which portrays its content partly by its sound. In places it may even foreshadow one kind of rap music.
For detailed discussion of visual experience as bearing on the aesthetics of music, see Bergeron and Lopes (2009: especially 8–11).
The consistency of my view with naturalism is explained in Audi (2013b: 55–57).
This paper has benefited from presentations in earlier versions at Bucknell University, Coastal Carolina University, the U. S. Military Academy, and Wake Forest University and from helpful comments by Susan Feagin, Christian Miller, Jeffrey Tolly, and Julian Young.
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Audi, R. Normativity and Generality in Ethics and Aesthetics. J Ethics 18, 373–390 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-014-9185-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-014-9185-y