One of the most fundamental facts about our treatment of persons is that we concern ourselves with the quality of their attitudes. In “Freedom and Resentment,” P. F. Strawson famously writes of “the very great importance that we attach to the attitudes and intentions towards us of other human beings, and the great extent to which our personal feelings and reactions depend upon, or involve, our beliefs about these attitudes and intentions” (1962: 5). Our reactive attitudes, as Strawson labels them, are attitudinal responses to the manifestation of good or ill will. For Strawson, our proneness to such reactive attitudes just is the most basic way in which we hold one another responsible.
In recent work, Susan Wolf (2015; 2016) has claimed that the reactive attitudes include some of the attitudes that we have toward artists for their works and performances, and that this indicates that we hold artists responsible for their artistic productions. Loving Jane Austen for her novels, or finding Henry James obnoxious for his, can, on Wolf’s view, be ways of holding them responsible. My goals in this paper are to develop this approach in a more thoroughly Strawsonian way and to show some of its limitations. For Strawson, holding responsible is, most basically, an attitudinal phenomenon, rather than one that necessarily manifests in behavior; further, we can fruitfully investigate responsibility by focusing on our actual practices of holding one another responsible, and what we presuppose in doing so, rather than on some idealization of those practices. I will argue that on a Strawsonian approach, the proper target of aesthetic reactive attitudes is an agent’s quality of aesthetic judgment. This approach entails that the core of creative artistic agency is not a matter of the artist’s embodied skill at all. Insofar as our practices of holding artists responsible include crediting them for such skill, a Strawsonian approach cannot be the full story about artistic responsibility.
The question of artistic responsibility, as I understand it, does not concern the specific responsibilities that artists bear—particular duties, obligations, or requirements that they must fulfill, qua artists—but rather concerns what, in general, artists are responsible for, and what we presuppose about artists when we hold them responsible by having reactive attitudes toward them. One might immediately wonder: why is there any interesting issue about artistic responsibility in particular? Why focus on holding persons responsible in their capacity as artists, rather than in their capacity as, say, carpenters?
For Wolf, the interest of what she calls ‘aesthetic responsibility’ lies in showing that the deepest and most important kind of responsibility that persons can bear is not exclusively moral. I completely agree. But the interest of what I am calling ‘artistic responsibility’—for reasons I explain below—is not limited to what it reveals about responsibility, but extends to what it demonstrates about the agency of artists. Given that Wolf’s larger project is to establish the existence of a kind of deep but non-moral responsibility, then focusing on a person’s sense of humor, their patterns of attention, or indeed anything that expresses their (non-moral) evaluative attitudes would also serve to advance that project. The question of distinctively artistic responsibility, however, is of philosophical interest in part because of the longstanding debate about whether and what creative artists, as such, do.
To state the issue briefly, the creative agency that artists exercise as such—whether in producing novel artworks or in interpreting and performing existing artworks—seems importantly distinct from other kinds of agency.1 On the one hand, artistic agency does not seem to be a species of planning agency, one that involves the execution of a prior intention whose content can be determinately specified in advance of what is done.2 This makes artistic agency distinct from much ordinary practical agency, in which our intentions tend to have more determinate content.3 On the other hand, artistic agency does not seem to be nonintentional; artworks are the products of some intentional action. Despite persisting cultural tropes, dating back at least to Plato’s Ion, of artists as passive vessels for the muses or hollow reeds through whom inspiration flows, most artists do plan, try, and act intentionally. Something about artists, as agents, can be expressed in their artistic productions. That something is the proper target of our reactive attitudes, whether or not it is under artists’ intentional control.4
The Strawsonian approach to responsibility in general, it should be noted, is not uncontroversial. Strawson brackets the metaphysical question of determinism and invites us to attend instead to the nondetached attitudes that we have toward particular agents for particular manifestations of their will. Some philosophers, by contrast, propose to investigate the metaphysics of responsibility directly, without the detour through our practices of holding one another responsible. But while what we might call a ‘strong’ Strawsonian claims, in a slogan, that responsibility is social, not metaphysical, and that there are no deep metaphysical facts about responsibility, a ‘weak’ Strawsonian insists only that any discussion of responsibility must somehow take account of our actual responsibility responses.5 In this paper, I do not take a stand on these larger questions. Rather, I aim to show both the attractions and limitations of a Strawsonian approach to aesthetic reactive attitudes. I will argue that, in holding creative artists responsible for their artistic productions, we target their quality of aesthetic judgment, and we presuppose that they are aesthetic value responsive, in senses to be clarified.
§1 develops a Strawsonian approach to aesthetic reactive attitudes and artistic responsibility by spelling out (i) the proper target of our responsibility responses, (ii) the ‘basic demand’ we make of artists as such, and (iii) the nature of artistic excuses and exemptions. §2 situates my view within the existing debate about the faces of artistic responsibility. Wolf has argued that artistic responsibility implicates the ‘attributability’ sense of responsibility, Dana Nelkin (2020; 2025) has argued that artistic responsibility implicates the ‘accountability’ sense, and one might reasonably think that it implicates the ‘answerability’ sense developed by Angela Smith (2015). I argue that artistic responsibility is none of these. In presupposing that artists are aesthetic value responsive, we expect them to be counterfactually sensitive to the realization of expected aesthetic value in their productions, but we do not expect them to be able to give their reasons for what they have done. §3 concludes by briefly discussing the issue of artists’ moral responsibility.
1. A Strawsonian Approach to Artistic Responsibility
Often, we appraise artworks with no thought at all to their creators. But in other contexts, we praise and criticize artists themselves. Think of the praise lavished on Vincent van Gogh for Irises, Toni Morrison for Beloved, or Joni Mitchell for “Both Sides, Now,” or the criticism heaped on Thomas Kincade for Rosebud Cottage, Jonathan Franzen for Purity, or Rebecca Black for “Friday.”
Sometimes, this praise and criticism is moral in its content. As Ted Nannicelli writes, “Particularly when a work inspires moral outrage, we are not content to merely appraise the work; we also want someone to be [held] responsible for what they have done” (2020: 52). Nannicelli implies that we want to identify individual artists, and while we cannot hold any particular person responsible for whatever flaws the Iliad or Beowulf possess, controversial artists such as Leni Riefenstahl, Woody Allen, and R. Kelly, to name a few, can themselves be held responsible, indeed even blamed, for what they do in their works.6 Though the term ‘holding responsible’ has negative connotations in ordinary usage, the phenomenon is not limited to unfavorable responses: we can hold someone responsible by praising or admiring or honoring them (see Telech 2022 for a helpful overview of the literature on praise and responsibility).
There has been extensive debate, in recent years, about the relationship between art and morality, and in particular about how artists’ moral flaws can and should affect our engagement with their productions, especially when those flaws are realized in their works.7 I return to the issue of works’ moral content in §3. For now, I want to emphasize that, as the quotation from Nannicelli implies, we can hold artists responsible even when the morality of their works is not at issue.
As Wolf has argued, aesthetic responsibility is not reducible either to mere causal responsibility or to moral responsibility. She characterizes aesthetic responsibility as “a kind of deep but nonmoral responsibility that an artist may have for the aesthetic qualities of his or her artworks” (2016: 2–3), and her positive argument turns on observations about the attitudes we can have toward artists. Wolf holds that those affectively laden responses—loving some artists, being left cold by others—are “of a piece with” Strawson’s reactive attitudes (2016: 4).8 In other words, the attitudes to which we can respond with reactive attitudes include the attitudes expressed in artworks:
Insofar as our tendency to resent or feel grateful to another for his actions is indicative of our taking him to be morally responsible, then, I suggest that our tendency to feel affection or distaste for an artist on the basis of her artworks is a sign that we take her to be aesthetically responsible as well (2016: 5).
Wolf’s claim is that the attitudes we adopt towards artists can be just as reactive—just as much a reaction to the manifestation of other attitudes—as canonical reactive attitudes like resentment, and equally opposed to what Strawson calls the objective attitude, which takes actions not as expressions of agency but as mere movements, caused but unwilled (Wolf 2015: 132).
For Wolf, the proper target of our reactive attitudes toward artists is the aesthetic qualities of their works, where this is a broad sense of ‘aesthetic’ not limited to the formal or narrowly perceptual. Part of what Wolf loves, in loving Jane Austen, is “the values, the sensibility, the perceptiveness, and so on, that made it possible for her to create the very characters, plots, and dialogues that she did” (2016: 8). However Wolf understands aesthetic qualities, they must include qualities of the work’s evaluative sensibility in a broad sense.
While I share this broader conception of the aesthetic, the proper target of our reactive attitudes toward artists cannot be the aesthetic qualities of their works as such, because the proper target of a reactive attitude must be the manifestation of some attitude. Reactive attitudes differ from other evaluative attitudes in that they are evaluations of a person based on that person’s attitudes. I will argue that the proper target of our aesthetic reactive attitudes in general is quality of aesthetic judgment, and hence that the proper target of our reactive attitudes toward artists is, when it is the aesthetic qualities of their works, those qualities only qua manifestation of aesthetic judgment. Just as it is a necessary condition on reactive attitudes in general that their targets’ attitudes are manifested to us in their behavior, so it is a necessary condition on artistic reactive attitudes that their targets’ aesthetic judgments are manifested to us in a realized work or performance.9 The following subsections consider (i) the proper target of our aesthetic responsibility responses, (ii) the ‘basic demand’ we make of artists as such, and (iii) the nature of artistic excuses and exemptions.
1.1 The Agential Target of Aesthetic Reactive Attitudes: Quality of Aesthetic Judgment
Everyone agrees that the scope of the aesthetic domain is not limited to the artistic, as cases of natural and personal beauty show. So it is potentially misleading to speak of ‘aesthetic’ responsibility, as Wolf does, only in the context of art. Aesthetic responsibility is something we bear also as appreciators of existing artworks and objects of natural beauty or ugliness, and we can hold one another aesthetically responsible through aesthetic reactive attitudes in general. As Keren Gorodeisky writes, we “form reactive attitudes toward our (dis)appreciating interlocutors: we’re disappointed by a good friend who dislikes a poet we love, or admire a critic who constantly helps us appreciate excellent works” (2022: 464), where disliking and appreciation are expressions of aesthetic judgment. Though my focus in this paper is our specifically artistic responsibility responses, it is worth stressing that the scope of our aesthetic reactive attitudes is broader, targeting aesthetic judgment in both creation and appreciation.
Creative artistic agency consists in part in creative aesthetic judgment. Whereas appreciative aesthetic judgment is of the aesthetic value of what is actual, creative aesthetic judgment is of the aesthetic value of what is non-actual.10 Many writers on the creative artistic process divide it, analytically, into two phases: the conception of a novel artwork to be produced, and the realization of that conception in an artistic medium.11 In practice, these phases do not typically come in sequence: only rarely, if ever, do artists work out their conceptions in full determinacy prior to attempting to realize them. Rather, a conception itself gains greater determinacy in the process of its realization. The first phase requires creative aesthetic judgment: among various possible conceptions that an artist originates, it is a matter of aesthetic judgment which ones are, in virtue of their aesthetic value, worthy of pursuit.12 The second phase tends to require, in addition, some embodied skill, which varies with the medium in question. My claim is that only creative aesthetic judgment, and not embodied skill, can be the proper target of artistic reactive attitudes.13
In excluding elements of embodied skill, I am taking seriously the Kantianism implicit in Strawson’s references to the will. Just as the good will shines like a jewel, even where it is unable to carry out its intention in the empirical world, so does the quality of aesthetic judgment, even where it cannot be realized in an artistic medium. It may be, however, that part of what makes a good will good is the possession of mental skills, such as empathetic or imaginative skill. This is especially plausible if education can, in virtue of inculcating such mental skills, improve the quality of one’s moral or aesthetic will, though I do not want to deny the possibility of an excellent but untutored will. I therefore distinguish whatever mental skills are already implicated in the quality of an agent’s aesthetic judgment from embodied skills that are manifested in bodily action only.14
One might object that our practices of awarding credit and discredit to artists do not concern their aesthetic judgment alone, but also the embodied skill they display in realizing their novel conceptions. I agree, and suggest that this points to a limitation of the Strawsonian approach in capturing the full range of our artistic responsibility responses. In partial defense of the Strawsonian approach, one might observe that we praise artists’ creative agency even in cases where they delegate much of the practical realization of their novel conceptions to others. Think of the praise we accord architects, film directors, and choreographers for their vision. (I return to this kind of distributed responsibility in §1.3.) Moreover, we can admire an artist’s manifest creative conception without faulting them for their inability to execute it in a performance or physically realized artwork: we can often tell what an artist’s aesthetic judgments were—what they were ‘going for’—even when they fail to fully realize them.15 But it seems to me undeniable that we also credit and criticize artists for their (lack of) embodied skill.
The Strawsonian approach, however, is committed to denying that the physical realization of a novel artistic conception, as such, could be a proper target of artistic reactive attitudes. Certainly one could manifest an attitude in the deployment of an embodied skill: one could demonstrate eagerness or laziness in performing a piano piece, where those character traits themselves reflect an agent’s evaluative judgments. But the meeting of some performance standard is not an attitudinal matter. Whether or not I manage to play all the right notes of the Chopin étude does not in itself reveal anything about my attitudes.16 So the agential target of our artistic reactive attitudes is the artist’s aesthetic judgments, as manifested in their productions. These are the proper targets of our distinctively artistic credit and criticism.
A different objection asks whether aesthetic reactive attitudes are, strictly speaking, reactive attitudes. This is in part an exegetical matter. For Strawson, the agency to which we appropriate respond with reactive attitudes is the manifestation of “good or ill will or disregard” (1962: 15). Wolf herself implies that aesthetic reactive attitudes are not: “it must be kept in mind that these attitudes are not reactions specifically to the good or ill will that the artist exhibits towards others” (2016: 8). As she observes, “the sphere of a person’s will” is often taken to coincide with what a person “does or is able to do intentionally” (2016: 18). And, as noted above, it is debated whether or not artistic creation is under intentional control. But this restrictive conception of the will, as that which is under intentional control, is not compulsory. On a broader conception, the will comprises all the states of mind that embody an agent’s evaluative ‘take’ on the world. For instance, Pamela Hieronymi writes that “a person’s will prominently includes their beliefs and intentions, but also their trusts and distrusts, admirations and contempts, cares and concerns, and so forth” (2022: 283). Hieronymi (2014) elsewhere argues that, besides what she calls the ‘managerial’ control we exercise over our intentional actions, we exercise a distinct kind of control—‘evaluative’ control—over our attitudes.17 On that broader conception, to which I am sympathetic, an artist’s creative aesthetic judgments, as manifested in their productions, would belong to their will. As a species of judgment, aesthetic judgment is a commitment, a setting of the will in a certain direction; the artist is ‘for’ their novel conception, aesthetically speaking. So while I do take aesthetic reactive attitudes to be reactive attitudes in Strawson’s sense, I will continue to speak of quality of aesthetic judgment (rather than quality of aesthetic will) as the proper target of our artistic responsibility responses, for the sake of clarity.
At the same time, however, artistic reactive attitudes are not necessarily reactions to an artist’s manifestation of aesthetic judgment ‘towards others’. Strawson distinguishes three classes of reactive attitudes. Personal reactive attitudes (e.g., resentment, gratitude) target the quality of will others display toward us; vicarious reactive attitudes (e.g., indignation, approbation) target the quality of will others display toward others; and self-reactive attitudes (e.g., shame, pride) target the quality of will we ourselves display. The fact that some artists feel proud of their own creative aesthetic judgments is evidence that there are aesthetic self-reactive attitudes. But there’s a sense in which aesthetic judgment is not an attitude toward others at all; it is not interpersonal. Even on views of aesthetic judgment that emphasize its interpersonal normativity—such as Kant’s view on which we presuppose that everyone ought to agree with us in judging an object to be beautiful or ugly—aesthetic judgment is not itself a directed personal attitude, but is better characterized as impersonal.18 Yet this does not, on Kant’s view, preclude us from holding one another aesthetically responsible; as he writes of the aesthetic judge, who “demands” agreement from others, “He rebukes them if they judge otherwise, and denies that they have taste, though he nevertheless requires that they ought to have it” (KU 5:213; 1790/2000: 98). Thus, the quality of aesthetic judgment that creative artists manifest is not inherently expressive of any attitude toward others; rather, it expresses a take as to what has aesthetic value, though one for which we can hold one another responsible.
Finally, as the earlier mention of the Iliad and Beowulf suggests, sometimes there is no particular person who is the target of reactive attitudes; many of our artistic reactive attitudes will be merely existentially quantified. But just as, on encountering a pile of litter at a camp site, we can think, ‘whoever did this should be ashamed of themselves’, so we can think, on encountering an anonymous artistic masterpiece, ‘whoever did this deserves our gratitude’.
Given that the proper target of aesthetic reactive attitudes is the quality of aesthetic judgment, the next question is what exactly our standard is for assessing such judgment.
1.2 The Basic Demand: Aesthetic Value Responsiveness
The commonplace with which Strawson begins is that our normal relations with persons come laden with expectations we have for the quality of their attitude, as manifested in how they act. What has been called the ‘basic demand’ in Strawson is “the demand for the manifestation of a reasonable degree of goodwill or regard” (1962: 16).19 In targeting an agent’s quality of will, we expect a reasonable degree of good will. This raises the question of what the basic demand is in the case of artistic responsibility. In targeting an artist’s quality of aesthetic judgment, I will argue that what we expect is not a reasonable degree of aesthetic judgment—since judgment does not come in degrees—but rather a reasonable degree of aesthetic value responsiveness. As with the discussion of quality of will in §1.1, I believe that this claim is ultimately consonant with Strawson’s view.
Aesthetic Value Responsiveness: To be responsive to aesthetic value in the creation of a novel artwork is (a) to be guided by one’s creative aesthetic judgment in such a way as (b) to be counterfactually sensitive to the realization of expected aesthetic value in that artwork.
This is meant to be a minimal account, with various choice points at which the account could be further developed. For instance, the account leaves open what it is to be guided by one’s creative aesthetic judgment. Antonia Peacocke (2025) argues that if artistic creation is to be under intentional control, then the artist must have a single guiding aim, which is an intention to do justice to a demonstratively grasped ‘proto-work’ by realizing that proto-work in accordance with the evaluative standard it sets up. But a Strawsonian approach can be flexible as to how the artist must be guided by their own artistic conception in order to merit aesthetic reactive attitudes.
Whatever guidance amounts to, it must be such as to make an artist (to some degree) counterfactually sensitive to the realization of aesthetic value in their artwork. That is, the artist would do otherwise if they represent that some action of theirs would detract from the completed work’s expected aesthetic value. The completed work would be different if the artist were not, in that way, sensitive to their take on aesthetic value. Note that this is not the claim that the artist is tracking actual aesthetic value, which might take place at the subpersonal level. Rather, it is the claim that an artist has a person-level representation of what they imagine, conceive, or judge will have aesthetic value.20
Aesthetic value responsiveness does not require that the only kind of value to which the artist is sensitive is aesthetic (or artistic) value. Artists may intend to realize other, non-aesthetic (or non-artistic) values as well, such as moral or political value. The Strawsonian account can be neutral with respect to formalism and the vexed question of whether such non-aesthetic values ever interact with aesthetic value (see Stear 2023 for a helpful overview). There is only one way to fully lack the counterfactual sensitivity required by the basic demand, which is to be fully indifferent to aesthetic value considerations.
Importantly, for Strawson, what counts as meeting the basic demand—and thus what counts as ‘a reasonable degree’ of good will—varies with relationship-type. We can think of these demands as standing in a determinable-determinate relationship, in that each realization of the specific demand is also, and thereby, a realization of the basic demand. What children expect of their parents is distinct from what friends expect of one another, which is distinct from what professors expect of their students. With strangers the basic demand is very easily met, merely by “an absence of the manifestation of active ill will” (1962: 15). More determinate expectations also vary with relationship-token, since individuals have discretion to alter the expectations they have of particular others. I might let slide some remark my mother makes, though I would resent my partner for making it, or vice versa.
In the artistic domain, the relevant types include medium, genre, artistic period, style, and other categories that generate more determinate expectations of aesthetic value responsiveness in a work. And the relevant tokens include our appreciative relationships with specific artists, and our expectations for their aesthetic value responsiveness. Here is where embodied skill may, in some cases, affect our artistic reactive attitudes: whereas the fact that an architect cannot operate a forklift is no reason to withdraw our artistic reactive attitudes, the fact that a painter cannot, and never could, wield a brush is a disabling condition on crediting or criticizing them for ‘their’ paintings. But those more determinate expectations whose content makes reference to embodied skills are thereby ‘non-basic’ and hence require for their intelligibility the capacity for aesthetic judgment that is presupposed already in the basic demand.
1.3 Artistic Responsibility: Excuses and Exemptions
Strawson’s distinction between reactive and objective attitudes applies readily in the artistic domain. There is a tremendously significant difference between believing that an artwork was the result of human agency and learning that it came about in such a way as to bypass the artist’s agency altogether. Discovering that what we thought was a Pollock painting was in fact produced by a randomized paint machine is the kind of fact that leads us to withdraw our artistic reactive attitudes toward Pollock. Reactive attitudes in general require, as an enabling condition, the appearance of a will. This appearance can be canceled, for Strawson, in one of two ways. In cases of excuse, we initially make a mistake about the polarity of a person’s quality of will, whether good or ill. I might feel resentment when you shove me to the ground, but when I learn that you yourself were pushed, I should no longer resent you: you didn’t actually display ill will toward me. Similarly, I might feel gratitude when you shove me out of the path of an incoming car, but I should no longer be grateful—at least not to you—when I learn that you yourself were pushed. In cases of exemption, we initially make a mistake about whether someone is, in general, capable of participating in a normal, valuable, adult human relationship. Someone with a persisting impulse control disorder might genuinely manifest ill will toward me. But their condition both disables my reason to feel resentment and means, sadly, that we will not be able to enjoy a normal relationship.21
Interestingly, matters are somewhat more complicated in the artistic case. For one thing, many of the conditions that seem to exempt agents from moral responsibility—notably, various persisting mental illnesses—do not exempt in the artistic case. I can permissibly feel gratitude toward Christopher Smart for his poems, written when he was confined to St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics in 1757. Or I can permissibly find an actor outrageous for her performance, even when I learn that she would otherwise merit moral exemption.22
When it comes to excuses, one might object that the quality of aesthetic judgment manifested in an artwork is unavoidably a matter of interpretation. But the same is true of the quality of will manifested in others’ behavior: we often debate what some remark, gesture, or omission of another agent ‘meant’ as an indication of their evaluative attitudes. If there is a difference between ordinary action and art here, it is one of degree and not kind.
There is one class of excuses that is unique to the artistic domain, which has to do with whether an artwork is finished. As Guy Rohrbaugh (2017) argues, artists do not fiat the completeness of their works but are responsive to the standard set up by their own creative plan. Rohrbaugh rightly observes that being unfinished is therefore an excusing condition for reactive attitudes: “The attribution of incompleteness undermines criticism precisely because what is unfinished does not reflect the artist’s will or, more precisely, the artist’s reflective endorsement of what he or she has already willed” (2017: 132).
Contrary to what Rohrbaugh explicitly says, however, what the artist reflectively endorses is not always something they have previously willed. This is easiest to see in cases of group-produced artworks and performances, particularly those in which one or a small number of agents ‘take responsibility’ for the work as a whole. Hieronymi calls this ‘jurisdictional responsibility’: the extended sense of responsibility we bear for what we can only partially affect and control through our intentional actions (2014: 11). Film and theatre directors, architects, choreographers, executive chefs, and conductors bear jurisdictional responsibility for their works as a whole, at least when they do not create their works alone. But excuses will operate in different ways, depending on whether features of their productions manifest their aesthetic judgments. If a dancer trips and falls, the choreographer may be excused for the inelegance of the performance. But if the cinematographer lights the film too garishly and overuses the fisheye lens, the director may not be excused. This is one of the ways in which what counts as meeting the basic demand will vary with the type of artwork in question.
Yet jurisdictional responsibility can be involved even in cases of single-authored artworks. This is easiest to see in cases of artworks that involve randomness or chance. Pollock does not exercise intentional control over every curve or texture of paint on his finished canvases, but he does select, among the canvases he produces, which ones reflect his aesthetic judgment, and hence are fit for public display. In reflectively endorsing only some canvases, he takes responsibility for their aesthetic qualities, even those whose production does not manifest his own creative aesthetic judgment.23
What this should remind us is that aesthetic judgment is exercised not only in the conception of novel artworks, but in the selection among options for those works, even those options that have not been originated by the artist (recall §1.1). Since artistic selection can, though need not, be among actual options, it can, when it is among actual options, be a matter of what I called appreciative aesthetic judgment, which is of what is actual. Hence artists, as such, can make both appreciative and creative aesthetic judgments, where both are proper targets of aesthetic reactive attitudes.
The aim of this section has been to develop a Strawsonian approach to our aesthetic reactive attitudes, as the most fundamental way in which we hold artists responsible. The aim of the next section is to apply this approach to the existing debate over what we presuppose about those artists whom we hold responsible.
2. The Faces of Artistic Responsibility
Given that we hold artists responsible, what do we presuppose about them when we do so? The philosophical literature on responsibility offers three possibilities. For an agent to be responsible in the attributability sense is for their actions or attitudes to reflect their having adopted an end or having committed to a certain conception of value. When some action or attitude Y is attributable to some agent X, then Y is disclosive of X’s deep self. For an agent to be responsible in the answerability sense is for that agent to be appropriately expected to be able to give their reasons for their actions or attitudes. When X is answerable for Y, X should be able to cite their reasons for Y. And for an agent to be responsible in the accountability sense is for that agent to be appropriately liable to sanction or adverse treatment. When X is accountable for Y, then if Y is bad or wrong, it is pro tanto permissible to sanction X. A sanction may be something weighty, like the imposition of a penalty or other harm, or less weighty, like a sharp remark or expression of anger.
Not everyone thinks that these are, in fact, three distinct kinds of responsibility. And those who think that they are distinct kinds still debate their relationship. Are these competing proposals, such that only one can ultimately be identified with responsibility? Or are they different ‘faces’ of responsibility (to use Gary Watson’s term) that pick out distinct kinds of responsibility agents can bear?24 I will not take a stand on such questions here. Rather, in this section, I will argue that in making the basic demand for aesthetic value responsiveness, we presuppose a view of artists that is none of these three.
Wolf is clear that she is thinking of artistic responsibility in the attributability sense: “to say that an artist is aesthetically responsible for her art is simply to say that the work can be attributed to her in a deeper or stronger than a merely causal sense; that it has a stronger and more personal connection to her than a mere causal connection would imply; that it comes from her and says something about her; that it is disclosive of her self” (2016: 20). It is unclear whether these are meant to be four distinct conditions or four different specifications of the same condition. But while I think that Wolf’s first three conditions are plausibly assumed when we hold artists responsible, I doubt that an artist’s work must be necessarily disclosive of their self in any heavy-duty sense of that notion. While an artist, in endorsing their own work, is committing to a certain take on aesthetic value, that take may be as short-lived as the creative process resulting in that very work. By contrast, what Wolf (2015) calls a person’s ‘deep’ self is typically taken to be a matter of their more durable commitments (Frankfurt 1999; Korsgaard 2009; Shoemaker 2015).
So I suggest that artistic responsibility is not attributability in Wolf’s sense. Could it be accountability? Dana Nelkin claims that it is, in offering a unified ‘Quality of Opportunity’ theory of moral, epistemic, and aesthetic responsibility.25 This theory holds
that acting badly with a sufficiently high quality of opportunity is necessary and sufficient for desert and blameworthiness in the accountability sense, and that doing well with a sufficiently low quality of opportunity (where factors include a high degree of difficulty or sacrifice) is necessary and sufficient for desert and praiseworthiness in the accountability sense (2020: 209).
There is much in Nelkin’s rich theory that I cannot engage with here, but let me first give some sense of what motivates her before offering two reasons to think that artistic responsibility is not accountability.
Accountability for Nelkin is tied to sanction in the following way: when an agent is blameworthy in the accountability sense, then they are deserving of sanctioning responses. And in order for those sanctioning, burden-conferring responses to be genuinely deserving, an agent must have had a fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing, just as for a praising, benefit-conferring response to be deserving, an agent must not have had a lot of opportunity to do as well as they did. What motivates Nelkin is the thought that much of our moral accountability framework, as she interprets it, can simply be transposed to the artistic case (2025: 293). In other words, unlike Wolf, who stresses the differences between artistic and moral responsibility, thereby providing us with a view of artistic responsibility that is importantly distinct from accountability, Nelkin is keen to identify the similarities, thereby providing us with a view of artistic responsibility just as accountability.
Here are two reasons to be hesitant. First, Nelkin is explicit that accountability requires control, in the sense of having had the freedom to do otherwise: to have avoided doing something blameworthy or not to have succeeded in doing something praiseworthy. There is a larger debate about whether the conception of free will implicit in the control condition is compatible with determinism, but we can ask about whether control matters even on a compatibilist framework that brackets the truth or falsity of determinism. Even so, issues of avoidability do not seem central to our artistic responsibility responses. My love of Virginia Woolf for her beautiful novels does not seem to turn, at all, on the question of whether she could have done otherwise. And the discussion of exemption in §1.3 suggests that conditions that would otherwise morally exempt—conditions that tend to undermine control in some sense—do not exempt from artistic reactive attitudes.26
Second, Nelkin’s view of praiseworthiness has the counterintuitive consequence that artists are less praiseworthy, other things being equal, if their art is less difficult to make. She writes, “If two artists created two equally beautiful paintings, but one had to work in very difficult conditions, then though they might be equally praiseworthy in the attributability sense, it seems that the one in the less conducive situation is more praiseworthy in the sense that is analogous to moral accountability” (2025: 299). Notice that Nelkin here effectively recognizes that there is a valid responsibility response we have to artists that doesn’t take into account questions of how difficult it was for them to produce their work. But I have a hard time grasping the sense of distinctively artistic praiseworthiness on which it matters which artist overcame more. We don’t—or at least we shouldn’t—give Academy Awards, Booker Prizes, or other honors for artistic achievement on the basis of how much artists had to overcome in their personal lives. Learning that something was very easy for an artist to create is not the kind of fact that, by itself, should diminish our praise for what they did in their artwork. I suspect that Nelkin here is thinking more about the elements of embodied skill, rather than creative aesthetic judgment, in artistic creation, whereas I have argued that the proper target of our artistic responsibility responses is the artist’s aesthetic judgment.
My view of artistic responsibility as responsiveness is closest to, but ultimately distinct from, answerability. On Angela Smith’s influential account of answerability, it is appropriate to ask that an agent ‘answer for’—cite their reasons in favor of—their attitudes or actions. As she puts it,
to say that an agent is morally responsible for something is to say that that agent is an appropriate target, in principle, of requests for justification regarding that thing and that she is eligible, in principle, for a variety of moral responses depending on how well or poorly she meets this justificatory request (2015: 103).
One advantage of answerability over attributability, when it comes to artistic responsibility, is that answerability applies even to one-off or uncharacteristic actions or attitudes, rather than only to those that express an agent’s standing commitments.
The difficulty with answerability has to do with the ‘in principle’ qualifier. For Smith, the qualifier marks the fact that the agent might not, in practice, be able to respond, or that there might not be others who are, in practice, able to request justification. But there remains a difficulty with asking for justification in principle in the artistic case. As Wolf writes, “We don’t expect Shakespeare or Cezanne [sic] or Mozart to be able to explain their choices of words, lines and notes” (2016: 18). Now, this observation may be compatible with holding artists responsible in the answerability sense. Perhaps we cannot expect an artist to be able to explain, to our satisfaction, their artistic choices; if so, then we should not place such a success condition on artists’ explanations. But answerability may require only the appropriateness of asking for an explanation, not its success.27
Still, there are at least three reasons to be skeptical that, in the artistic case, it is appropriate to expect the actual giving of reasons. First, Smith’s notion of answerability is explicitly one of moral answerability. While the request to articulate one’s reasons is apt in the moral domain, which is plausibly subject to some kind of publicity condition on justification, the same cannot be said for artistic creation and appreciation. While being dumbfounded when asked to justify one’s actions or attitudes is typically regarded as undesirable, we do not seem to have the same worries about artistic dumbfounding. ‘It just seemed right’, when said by an artist, seems more appropriate as a response to a request for justification than when said by a moral agent. Of course, there are debates about whether or not an agent in possession of articulated moral understanding is thereby morally better; my aim is not to engage such debates, but merely to make the comparative claim that the ability to articulate one’s reasons is plausibly less important in the arts than in morality.
Second, and more strongly, what we expect of artists as such is not a discursive ability (except in the case of literary artists). Consider the disappointment we often have when we hear artists speak about their work in contexts external to that work. That disappointment is, I think, an expression of our expectation that what should really speak for the artist is their work. What artists say about their work matters only if it helps us to appreciate what is already realized in the work. Indeed, there is a long tradition in philosophical aesthetics of taking artistic content to be importantly non-discursive: not the kind of thing that can be captured in propositional form, or adequately paraphrased in linguistic terms. At the same time, as I have claimed, we do not expect artistic actions to be totally unguided by responsiveness to aesthetic value. As Kenny Walden writes, a work of art would be “a disaster if its crucial features appeared wholly arbitrary, if we thought the painter chose certain contours and colors at random” (2024: 284). Those artists whom we praise or criticize are precisely those whom we expect to have the capacity to be responsive to aesthetic value.
Third, reflection on the impersonality of aesthetic judgment (as discussed in §1.1) already suggests that artistic responsibility is not answerability. Aesthetic judgment is not itself a directed personal attitude, so the quality of an artist’s relation to others is not immediately altered by any creative aesthetic judgment of theirs that is manifested in a finished artwork. As such, and unlike in the moral case, in which the quality of our relations can be impaired simply by our being unable to furnish justifications, artists as such do not seem to be answerable to anyone. Thus, while artistic reactive attitudes, as reactive attitudes, are necessarily directed toward persons, they are not interpersonal in the sense in which Strawson’s paradigm reactive attitudes are.28
My overall claim, then, is that when we hold artists responsible, we presuppose that they have the capacity to be responsive to aesthetic value, without necessarily being able to articulate that to which they are responsive. This is the kind of responsibility presupposed when we hold artists responsible through our aesthetic reactive attitudes.
3. Conclusion
I have developed a Strawsonian approach to artistic responsibility and argued that it has the resources to illuminate our practices of crediting and criticizing artists. The most basic demand we make of artists as such—a demand that is reflected in the reactive attitudes we bear toward them—is that they be guided by their creative aesthetic judgment in such a way as to be counterfactually sensitive to the realization of expected aesthetic value in their productions. Yet we do not expect artists to be able to give their reasons for what they have done. This marks an important difference between artistic agency and moral agency.
On a Strawsonian approach, the proper target of our reactive attitudes in general is the manifestation of other attitudes in behavior. When it comes to artistic responsibility, I have argued that the proper target of our aesthetic reactive attitudes is the aesthetic judgment of artists as manifested in their completed works. In excluding the elements of embodied skill that are required to realize at least some artistic conceptions, the Strawsonian approach fails to capture the full range of our artistic responsibility responses. This marks an important difference between artistic agency and much ordinary practical agency.
I conclude by briefly addressing the issue of artists’ moral responsibility. Although artworks can be morally flawed in virtue of how they are produced (Nannicelli 2020), or what they produce in the world (Harold 2020), most commonly discussed in recent years has been the morality of an artwork’s perspective: the evaluative attitudes an artist manifests in and toward their works’ content (Carroll 1996; Gaut 2007; Eaton 2012). Examples of artists intentionally endorsing immoral attitudes in their works are sadly common. Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will (1935) endorses an attitude of awe and admiration toward Hitler at his Nuremberg rallies. Some of Balthus’ paintings endorse an attitude that objectifies and sexualizes young girls. The song “Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number” (1994), produced by R. Kelly, endorses an attitude that approves of adult men having sex with underage women.
A further advantage of the Strawsonian approach is that it easily has the resources to explain the phenomenon of holding artists morally responsible. Indeed, it is naturally suited to do so, given that it targets the attitudes of the artist that are manifested in their productions. Among the evaluative attitudes to which we can respond with reactive attitudes are the moral attitudes that an artist appears to endorse in their works. One question is whether, when we hold artists morally responsible, we are doing so in their capacity as artists. This is one of the choice points mentioned in §1.2 above. While a certain kind of formalist or autonomist may deny that artists are, as such, responsive to moral considerations, those in the opposing camp hold that artists can and should be responsive to morality, particularly when their artistic aims—writing a narrative about World War II rather than painting a non-representational canvas, say—require it.
In a recent discussion, T. M. Scanlon writes that “the things a person is responsible for in the most basic sense relevant to moral reactive attitudes are facts about what the person takes to be reasons (for actions or other attitudes) and facts about how the person governs him or herself in the light of these reasons” (2022: 200). My view has been that the things an artist is responsible for in the most basic sense relevant to aesthetic reactive attitudes are facts about what the person takes to be aesthetically valuable and facts about how the artist governs themself in the light of that take.
One of the reasons Strawson’s program has been so fecund in moral psychology is that it has fostered the investigation of specific relationship-types and of particular reactive attitudes. My hope is that philosophers of art will be inspired to think in similar ways about our normative expectations for and attitudes toward various types of artists.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to two helpful referees at this journal, and to audiences at Antwerp, Auburn, Brown, Charleston, Sheffield, Southampton, Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the Eastern APA. Thanks to Rachel Achs for her comments on that last occasion, to Macalester Bell, Michael Dickson, Keren Gorodeisky, Arata Hamawaki, Jim Moster, Kurt Sylvan, and Daniel Whiting for discussion, and to N. L. Engel-Hawbecker, Harvey Lederman, Jeremy Page, and Antonia Peacocke for written comments on earlier versions. Thanks also to the participants in my fall 2023 graduate seminar at UT Austin, especially John Bengson and David Sosa. Special thanks to Bence Nanay, whose sharp reactions spurred me to finally write the version of the paper that I really cared about.
Notes
- For the purposes of this paper, I will use ‘artistic agency’ as shorthand for ‘creative artistic agency’. Creative agency can be exercised other than by artists. And it is arguable that artists can, as such, do things that are not creative: the performer can attempt simply to replicate last night’s performance again tonight. But philosophical interest in artistic agency is centered around the creativity that artists evince. See Boden (2004) for one classic discussion of creativity. ⮭
- Kant (1790/2000) and Collingwood (1938), to name just two, are often associated with the view that art cannot be produced in accordance with general rules or conceived in general terms. Both draw a distinction between art and craft partly in terms of creativity, which is present only in art. ⮭
- One dissenting view comes from Anscomb (2021), who claims that creative agency is a species of executive agency. But Anscomb has an unusually broad notion of executive agency: for her, it is sufficient for exercising executive agency that an agent “successfully anticipate the effect that the remote consequences of their actions will have” on their works (2021: 415). ⮭
- Those who claim that artistic creation is meaningfully under intentional control include Livingston (2005), Zangwill (2007), Anscomb (2021), and Peacocke (2025); those who deny this include Prodoehl (2023) and Kauppinen (2025). ⮭
- To put the point differently, Strawsonians and non-Strawsonians alike can endorse the following biconditional: an agent is responsible for φ-ing if and only if they can appropriately be held responsible for φ-ing. But whereas a non-Strawsonian would give the left-hand side explanatory priority, and a strong Strawsonian would give the right-hand side explanatory priority, I do not take a stand on whether one side grounds the other (or whether some no-priority view is true). For discussion, see, e.g., Watson (1987/2004; 2014), Russell (1992), Wallace (1996), Brink and Nelkin (2013), and Todd (2016). ⮭
- I do not assume that blame is the only way we hold others negatively responsible. I take holding responsible to be the genus, of which blaming, demanding answers, protesting, and criticizing are species (though perhaps not distinct species). See Shoemaker and Vargas (2021) and Portmore (2022) for general discussions of non-moral blame and Kubala (2024) for a defense of aesthetic blame. ⮭
- See Carroll (1996) and Gaut (2007) for two now classic discussions of ‘moralism’ and ‘ethicism’, respectively, about the interaction between aesthetic and ethical value, and Matthes (2022) for a recent discussion of artists’ biographical moral flaws. ⮭
- It should be noted that Strawson is, as I read him, a cognitivist about the reactive attitudes: however affectively laden the reactive attitudes may be, they nonetheless “depend upon, or involve, our beliefs” about other attitudes (1962: 5). But see Bennett (1980) and Deigh (2011) for readings of Strawson as a non-cognitivist. ⮭
- Strawson emphasizes that the quality of others’ wills is only “manifested in their behaviour” (1962: 15). ⮭
- I am assuming that appreciative and creative aesthetic judgment are distinct species of aesthetic judgment, though this may be challenged without affecting my main claims. See Matherne (2024: Ch. 8) for a reading of Kant on which appreciative judgments of the beautiful are essentially creative, and see Sun (2022) for a discussion that emphasizes the importance, to aesthetic appreciation, of making comparative judgments between actual and hypothetical works. ⮭
- Zangwill (2007) and Prodoehl (2023) refer to the former phase as the having of an ‘aesthetic insight’, Kauppinen (2025) as the perception or conception of a ‘novel affordance’ that serves an ‘aesthetic aspirational aim’, and Peacocke (2025) as the process of ‘creative conception’. ⮭
- While it is a debated question whether the artistic merit of an artwork consists in anything other than its aesthetic value (Lopes 2011, Huddleston 2012, Hanson 2017), I am assuming here that artistic merit just is aesthetic value realized in art. ⮭
- Kauppinen claims that while creative conception can itself be analytically distinguished into (a) production of and (b) selection among novel ideas, genuine creativity requires that the two phases be achieved jointly: “the artist simultaneously perceives or conceives of a possibility and regards it as a worthwhile contender for promoting the aspirational aim, or simply recognizes it as (perhaps partially) realizing it” (2025: 250). ⮭
- Thanks to Jeremy Page for comments that inspired this paragraph. ⮭
- As an anonymous referee points out, this raises difficult issues in the theory of artistic content and interpretation; I cannot here defend the possibility of ‘unrealized meaning’ in art. ⮭
- It is tempting to explain this pattern by appeal to luck: whereas meeting some performance standard can be a matter of luck (one’s body happens to move in the precise ways that constitute success), one’s evaluative judgments are not a matter of luck, or at least not the same kind of luck. ⮭
- Other views on which responsibility does not require intentional control include those of Adams (1985) and Smith (2005). ⮭
- See Riggle (2021), however, for a contrary view of aesthetic judgments as directed invitations. ⮭
- The terminology of the ‘basic demand’ comes from Watson (1987/2004) and has since been widely adopted. Wolf (2016) does not discuss this part of the Strawsonian framework. Talk of ‘demands’ should be taken as referring not to strict deontic requirements, or to the class of speech act, but simply to our normative expectations (Macnamara 2013); Strawson himself writes interchangeably of “expectation or demand” (1962: 15). ⮭
- Why do I not speak of aesthetic reasons responsiveness? Plausibly, reasons are facts, and facts are not determinable, but values, such as beauty, are determinable. Some worry that the relevant reasons would be too fine-grained for artists to be guided by them (Prodoehl 2023) and others worry that artists do not reason to the conclusion that some act is aesthetically right (Kauppinen 2025). But value responsiveness is not a matter of reasoning, and artists can be sensitive to one and the same value at various levels of determinacy. ⮭
- While these two categories are explicitly distinguished by Strawson, the influential terminology of ‘excuse’ and ‘exemption’ itself comes from Watson (1987/2004). ⮭
- See Silvia and Kaufman (2010) for an overview of the empirical literature on creativity and mental illness. ⮭
- If Prodoehl (2024) is correct in arguing that luck undermines responsibility, and that artists’ motor activity is heavily subject to luck, then jurisdictional responsibility plays a larger role even in single-authored artworks than many have thought. ⮭
- Watson (1996/2004) and Wolf (2015) both distinguish attributability and accountability, but disagree about the relation between them: Watson holds that there is no accountability without attributability, while Wolf claims there can be accountability without attributability. Shoemaker (2015) thinks there are three kinds, while Smith (2015) thinks there is only one: answerability. ⮭
- Like Wolf, Nelkin restricts her conception of aesthetic responsibility to artistic achievements and failures. ⮭
- Kauppinen (2025) speaks for many in claiming that reactive attitudes are a way of holding others accountable. But Hieronymi (2022) correctly observes that reactive attitudes are not in themselves burden- or benefit-conferring. As such, reactive attitudes do not presuppose accountability. ⮭
- For Hieronymi, answerability is importantly weaker than it is for Smith: an agent is answerable just in case a question about their reasons is ‘given application’, where the assumption that gives application to a request for one’s reasons is “that the person has, in some sense, settled for him- or herself (positively) the question of whether to φ” (2014: 14). My view of artistic responsibility is closest to, though still distinct from, Hieronymi’s notion of answerability. ⮭
- Thanks to two anonymous referees for comments that inspired this paragraph. ⮭
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