The Ethical and the Aesthetic in Literature: What’s Missing in the Ethical Criticism Debate
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis will examine the ethical criticism debate within the philosophy of literature, with a focus on the interaction between ethical and aesthetic value in works of literary art. It is clear that works can be criticized and praised for their technical elements such as plot, theme, characterization, narrative style, point of view, and others. Most literary works (and indeed nearly all works of narrative fiction) also have ethical content to consider in addition to the technical elements. At the heart of the ethical criticism debate is the question of how to incorporate ethical content into aesthetic judgements about a literary work’s aesthetic value. This issue is known as the interaction problem. After a critical overview of the existing debate, the thesis will argue for four important definitions to keep any ethical criticism discussion unambiguous: aesthetic quality, technical feature, aesthetically relevant ethical content, and aesthetically neutral ethical content. I argue that the aesthetic quality of a work is a ‘gestalt’ property which is the subject of an aesthetic evaluation, and which can consist of both technical qualities and aesthetically relevant ethical content. This framework will not be a universal claim about all narrative works and all ethical content. As aesthetically neutral ethical content suggests, some works will have ethical content which does not factor into that work’s aesthetic quality. Ethical content may take the form of a specific viewpoint the work seemingly endorses. We may agree with the endorsement, but perhaps it is too heavy-handed and harms the work’s aesthetic value. Ethical content may take the form of placing the reader in imagined situations which contain ethical themes, and this ethically significant imagining elevates the work’s aesthetic value. The thesis will therefore stress the variety of forms ethical content can take and the variety of effects that content can have on a work’s aesthetic value, avoiding absolutes that create contradictions when evaluating broad ranges of literary works.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.037 | 0.070 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.103 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.030 | 0.064 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.018 | 0.021 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".