Meriting a response: The paradox of seductive artworks

According to what I call the Merit Principle, artworks attempting to elicit unmerited responses, such as horror films inviting fear towards something unfrightening, are aesthetically flawed. This paper shows how the principle generates a novel paradox when applied to an undertheorized class that I call ‘seductive works’: these necessarily invite an unmerited response in order to invite a (merited) repudiation of that response. I consider a number of unsuccessful attempts to preserve the Merit Principle, discuss what is challenging about seductive artworks, and briefly defend a new principle appealing to a general way that constraints under which a work operates condition its aesthetic value. This principle not only resolves the paradox, but explains the competing intuitions giving rise to it