Quote:
Originally Posted by Textcritic
I An ongoing debate taking place right now in my community is what to do with Joosten's past scholarship. Do his deplorable crimes disqualify his scholarly work? By continuing to consult his past publications, do we—even unintentionally—validate his consumption of child abuse images?
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In an objective field could you can’t just discount the work of someone. If whoever is primarily responsible for the Covid Vaccine is child abuser we would still all line up to get the vaccine. If a provable Grand Unification Theory was created by a child abuser you couldn’t undiscover the theory.
So where science is correct it is correct regardless of the acts of the person who discovered it.
As scholarship becomes more subjective and based in philosophy and argumentation then the merits and biases of the author matter. Therefore the character of the author also matters. You probably see this most in history where interpretation of the same evidence is framed with the biases of the culture one comes from. So if the scholarly work relies on the subjective interpretation of evidence then anyone relying on that work should understand the bias and flaws of the author.
Then you get to the artist where there is even more intertwining of the art and the circumstances it was created and who it was created by. I don’t believe that Art exists without context so for me it is much easier to dismiss the are of a horrible person.
I don’t know anything about this guys work to know where it would fit but that his how I would approach the question.