Topics Beauty

Question It is hard to believe that aesthetical value is objective. Whatever you choose as the most beautiful person, sunset or painting, it seems easy to imagine an appropriate alien who would find it ugly or uninteresting. My question is whether non objectivity of aesthetical value should count as an argument against the objectivity of moral value. After all, there seem to be some important common points to ethics and aesthetics. Isn't ethics concerned with what we should do as aesthetics is concerned with what we should enjoy to perceive?

Accepted:
May 31, 2012

Comments

There used to be a popular argument in philosophy just like this, and clearly as you say there are similarities between ethics and aesthetics. I don't think that aesthetics is about what we should enjoy to perceive, though, since there are many things we think we ought to see but certainly do not enjoy seeing.

As you say, people may disagree about value judgements, and often do, but that does not show they are not true and objective. People disagree about all sorts of things, after all. There are certainly some works of art which I could understand people not appreciating, but others which I could not. Similarly, if someone said that he thought it was alright to kill someone because the latter had annoyed him, I would not know what to say. A lot of urban murders do take place for precisely this reason nonetheless. It is difficult to think there is not something objective lurking in these value judgements, but precisely how to identify it is very difficult to understand.