JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Journal of Philosophy, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Philosophy.http://www.jstor.org AESTHETIC QUALITIES AND AESTHETIC VALUE 23 AESTHETIC QUALITIES AND AESTHETIC VALUE 0 say that an object is beautiful or ugly is seemingly to refer to a property of the object. But it is also to express a positive or negative response to it, a set of aesthetic values, and to suggest that others ought to respond in the same way. Such judgments are descriptive, expressive, and normative or prescriptive at once. These multiple features are captured well by Humean accounts that analyze the judgments as ascribing relational properties. To say that an object is beautiful is to say, in part, that it is such as to elicit a response expressing pleasure in certain observers. The observers in question must not be ignorant, biased, insensitive, or of poor taste, and they must not base their evaluations on aesthetically irrelevant properties of the objects they judge. The reference to the object's "being such . . ." captures the objective side of the relation; reference to the pleasurable response captures the expressive function of these judgments; and the ideal properties of the observers suggest that others ought to judge in the same way.Beauty is a relatively nonspecific or broadly evaluative relational property, in that its ascription leaves unspecified how the object is such as to elicit this positive response in suitable observers. This, together with the requirement that critics not base their judgments on aesthetically irrelevant properties, implies that beauty must supervene on other properties. In general, if evaluative properties are to be analyzed in this way which captures the various functions of evaluative judgments, then they must be supervenient properties.Before proceeding to a discussion of the base properties on which beauty supervenes, I should note that it may not be the most broadly evaluative aesthetic quality, although it is the quality most often mentioned in this light. The beautiful, as we know from Kant and other aestheticians of that age, may be contrasted with the sublime, but also with sets of artworks having other qualities that may confer artistic merit on them. Artistic merit itself is both broader and narrower than beauty: broader, in that it may be based on other properties, such as expressiveness (e.g., power) or originality, that may not confer beauty on their objects; and narrower, in that it is possessed only by artworks, whereas natural phenomena may be beautiful as well. The beautiful is pleasurable to observe; artistic merit may not always give pleasure, although it will elicit a positive response and pres...
The first part of this paper defines a central problem for professional ethics: whether agents in professional roles are to act on their own moral perceptions or rather defer to those with special authority to make decisions within particular institutional settings. Specifically, should the psychologist decide for himself whether and how to testify as an expert witness, or should he allow the judge and lawyer to settle these questions for him? I argue that he must decide for himself and attempt to control the nature of his testimony. Given this preliminary conclusion, the second part of the paper argues on direct moral grounds first for a general presumption in favor of psychologists' testimony on the accuracy of eyewitnesses. Such testimony fits the legal criterion of reasonable doubt, if the psychologists' information is more accurate than that of the average juror and lawyer. Second, it is argued that the expert witness must resist intense adversarial pressures and present his testimony as impartially and objectively as possible. THE MORAL FRAMEWORKThe initial moral issues that face a psychologist who considers whether and how to testify as an expert witness share a common structure that exemplifies the central issue in professional ethics itself. The psychologist will ponder his role within the trial context. He will question whether he can properly act as an advocate or whether he must remain objective and neutral (and whether the latter stance is possible in an adversarial setting). He will wonder whether he can leave it to the judge to decide if his testimony is admissible and to the jury to decide how to interpret it once it has been admitted. Should he take the chance that his testimony will be twisted to one or the other lawyer's purpose, that it might be used to effect a result to which he is morally opposed, or that it might have an adverse effect on the jury's deliberation, leading them to the wrong decision? The preliminary but most fundamental issue under which these different questions are subsumed is whether the psychologist must weigh the possible uses and effects of
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