 Beardsley’s version of aesthetic hedonism has served as a model for subsequent versions (Levinson 2002, n. 23); at least all subsequent versions consist of an epistemically qualified hedonic thesis in some form. Beardsley’s version, however, seems open to counter-example. Consider Tony Morrison’s Beloved, for instance, or Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Taking pleasure from works designed to cause shock, horror, despair, or moral revulsion may seem perverse; surely, it may seem, such works do not have whatever aesthetic value they have in virtue of any pleasure they give. One way to accommodate such cases is to cast aesthetic pleasure as a higher-order response, that is, a response that depends on lower-order responses, which in some cases might include shock, horror, despair, and moral revulsion (Walton 1993, 508; Levinson 1992, 18). Another way is to broaden the field of experiences that may ground aesthetic value. Though pleasure as a rule grounds aesthetic value, in exceptional cases certain non-hedonic yet intrinsically valuable experiences—which may include horror, shock, despair, and revulsion—may also do so (Levinson 1992, 12; Stecker 2005, 12). The literature refers to this latter, broadened variety of hedonism as aesthetic empiricism; it hasn’t settled on a name for the former variety, but we may call it tiered hedonism, given the varying levels of response it takes aesthetic experience to comprise.