In this paper, I attempt to recover an 18th Century approach to moral theory that can be called Moral Taste Theory. Through an exploration of 18th Century sources I define the characteristics of moral taste theory and to distinguish it from its closest rival, moral sense theory. In general a moral taste theorist holds that moral judgments are analogous to aesthetic judgments while a moral sense theorist holds that moral (...) judgments are analogous to physical sense perception. Francis Hutcheson was a paradigmatic moral sense theorist, but I argue that David Hume is best understood as a moral taste theorist. If we do not understand the concept of moral taste, we cannot understand 18th Century moral philosophy, and, more importantly, we will miss out on an important source of inspiration for 21st Century moral philosophy. (shrink)

Despite appeals to Hume in debates over moralism in art criticism, we lack an adequate account of Hume’s moralist aesthetics, as presented in “Of the Standard of Taste.” I illuminate that aesthetics by pursuing a problem, the moral prejudice dilemma, that arises from a tension between the “freedom from prejudice” Hume requires of aesthetic judges and what he says about the relevance of moral considerations to art evaluation. I disarm the dilemma by investigating the taxonomy of prejudices (...) by which Hume justifies the true judge’s moralism. The result distinguishes Hume’s aesthetic and moral points of view while defending aesthetic moralism. (shrink)

Autonomous weapon systems could in principle release military personnel from the onus of killing during combat missions, reducing the related risk of suffering a moral injury and its debilita...

Eriksson thinks that moral disagreements are intuitively faulty whereas disagreements about taste are intuitively faultless. He attempts to account for this difference by arguing, first, that moral judgements and taste judgements differ with regard to the presence of a disposition to challenge conflicting judgements and, second, that the intuition that a judgement is mistaken consists in the disposition to challenge it. In this article, I focus on the reasons given to support the first claim and argue (...) that they are not sufficient. First, I assess the thesis that a taste judgement is only contingently connected with a disposition to challenge conflicting judgements. Second, I focus on the claim that a moral judgement is in part a disposition to challenge conflicting judgements. In both cases, I argue that the reasons given fail to disclose any substantial difference between the two domains. (shrink)

Shows how lousy food, cheesy clothes, and dingy homes can ruin our lives.

The aim of this paper is to argue against a growing tendency to assimilate moral disagreements to disagreements about matters of personal taste. The argumentative strategy adopted in the paper appeals to a battery of linguistic criteria that reveal interesting and important differences between predicates of personal taste and moral predicates. The paper further argues that these semantically tractable differences have an impact on the nature of the corresponding disagreements.

In his essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste,’ Hume argues that artworks with morally flawed outlooks are, to some extent, aesthetically flawed. While Hume's remarks regarding the relationship between art and morality have influenced contemporary aestheticians, Hume's own position has struck many people as incoherent. For Hume appears to entangle himself in two separate contradictions. First, Hume seems to claim both that true judges should not enter into vicious sentiments and that true judges should adopt the standpoint of an (...) artwork's intended audience. But The Iliad, say, was obviously intended for an audience that shared Homer's flawed moral outlook. Second, Hume appears to claim that our moral sentiments are both highly resistant to change and extremely fragile. This essay defends Hume against these two objections by drawing increased attention to the role that Hume's aesthetics assigns to the faculty of good sense or sound reason. (shrink)

A review of Karl Axelsson's "Political Aesthetics" (Bloomsbury Academic. 2019).

Advocates of veganism often assume that food enjoyment has little moral weight, because it involves mere taste pleasure. Because of the triviality of taste pleasure, they consider it obvious that harming animals to secure particular tastes is ‘unnecessary’. After discussing the elements of taste, defending the importance of taste, exploring what ‘unnecessary harm’ means, and introducing a number of taste related thought experiments, I argue that harm to animals is not always unnecessary, when what's (...) at stake is taste. However, by supplementing considerations involving necessity with considerations of character, I conclude that vegans are often, though not always, praiseworthy. (shrink)

Dans la troisièmeCritique, Kant prétend que la beauté est le symbole de la moralité et que la réflexion sur cette relation est un devoir. Cet article présente l’argument de Kant comme un double argument. Premièrement, l’expérience de la beauté renforce notre sentiment moral. Deuxièmement, à travers le jugement sur le beau, nous supposons que la nature poursuit des fins indéterminées, sur la base de quoi l’on pourrait concevoir que la nature coopère à nos fins pratiques. Ainsi, dans l’intérêt de (...) la culture morale et de la motivation morale, il est nécessaire de traiter la beauté comme le symbole spécial de la moralité. (shrink)

It may be that Kant’s inherently communal concept of taste is a morally laden notion that blurs the line between the good and the beautiful, on the one hand, and moral evaluation and aesthetic appreciation, on the other. In particular, it can be shown how, on Kant’s view, moralistic factors, such as considerations of social appropriateness, enter into estimations of aesthetic value. Moreover, Kant’s tendency to overlap taste and morals suggests an underlying assumption operative in Kant’s aesthetics. (...) According to this ‘decency assumption’, as I have termed it, taste is first and foremost a trait of people with certain supposedly refined socio-moral characteristics. Kant also seems to think that having good taste and a morally good character go hand in hand. Even though we do find separate sets of ultimate principles in Kant’s ethics and aesthetics, the aforesaid assumption nevertheless implies a shared ground between these two branches of philosophy and thereby links them tightly together, contrary to the common view that ethics and aesthetics are distinct enterprises. In addition, Kant’s morally laden conception of taste will be shortly examined in relation to the Enlightenment project as Kant saw it and our contemporary world. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Philosophers' Denigration of Fashion Taste and Style Genius Love of Beauty as A Moral (Or Proto‐moral) Motive Conclusion.

This book constitutes one of the most important contributions to recent Kant scholarship. In it, one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Kant, Henry Allison, offers a comprehensive, systematic, and philosophically astute account of all aspects of Kant's views on aesthetics. The first part of the book analyses Kant's conception of reflective judgment and its connections with both empirical knowledge and judgments of taste. The second and third parts treat two questions that Allison insists must be kept distinct: the normativity (...) of pure judgments of taste, and the moral and systematic significance of taste. The fourth part considers two important topics often neglected in the study of Kant's aesthetics: his conceptions of fine art, and the sublime. (shrink)

If good taste is a virtue, then an account of good taste might be modelled on existing accounts of moral or epistemic virtue. One good reason to develop such an account is that it helps solve otherwise intractable problems in aesthetics. This paper proposes an alternative to neo-Aristotelian models of good taste. It then contrasts the neo-Aristotelian models with the proposed model, assessing them for their potential to contend with otherwise intractable problems in aesthetics.

This chapter discusses four principal themes of Scottish aesthetics over the course of the eighteenth century. The first is the question of ‘taste’ and its relation to the perception and reality of beauty. Does beauty exist independently of its being perceived, or is it in some sense the product of our perception? The second is the matter of aesthetic criticism. Can aesthetic judgements be rational, and if so on what basis? The third main topic is the rhetorical use of (...) language. Is oratory an art? If it is, how does rhetoric relate to literary and poetic language, to the expression of thought and the cogency of argument? Finally, is there something to be learned on these subjects from the study of the origins of language? On each of these topics, the Scottish philosophers had interesting, insightful, and in some cases enduringly important things to say. (shrink)

Psychopaths are the bugbears of moral philosophy. They are often used as examples of perfectly rational people who are nonetheless willing to do great moral wrong without regret; hence the disorder has received the epithet “moral insanity” (Pritchard 1835). But whereas philosophers have had a great deal to say about psychopaths’ glaring and often horrifying lack of moral conscience, their aesthetic capacities have received hardly any attention, and are generally assumed to be intact or even enhanced. (...) Popular culture often portrays psychopaths in ways that suggest a great gap between their amorality and their aesthetic sensitivity. In The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), Hannibal Lecter appreciates fine art, fashion, and wine, while he eats his way through his enemies. His real-life counterparts, however, do not demonstrate the same sensitivities. There is no evidence that psychopaths are capable of real aesthetic appreciation, and some evidence that they are not. In this paper, we set out the limited evidence for the psychopath’s deficient aesthetic sensitivity. The best explanations of what the psychopath lacks turn out to implicate abilities that are also thought to be central to moral thought and action: an impaired capacity for empathizing with others and deficient ability to take a disinterested attitude towards things (socalled distance). We endorse the latter explanation. Thinking about what underlies the psychopath’s deficient aesthetic understanding turns out to throw light on a difficult problem: the connection between ethics and aesthetics. (shrink)

I reconstruct the aestheticism of Martin Buber in order to provide a new way of framing his moral philosophy and development as a thinker. The evolution of Buber’s thought does not entail a shift from aesthetics to ethics, but a shift from one aspect of aesthetics to another, namely, from taking genius to be key to social renewal, to taking taste to be key. I draw on Kantian aesthetics to show the connection between Buber’s aesthetic concerns and his (...) moral concerns, and to defend the notion that a certain aesthetic orientation may be just what is needed for moral response. (shrink)

This essay investigates Dasan Jeong Yak‐yong's (1762–1836) account of human‐nature‐as‐taste, by comparing his commentaries on significant chapters in the Mengzi to Zhu Xi's commentaries. Dasan argues that human nature is understood through giho, taste sentiments and desires, and not as Principle (li). I first introduce Dasan's account of human‐nature‐as‐taste in his commentaries to 3A1 and 7A4. Next, I argue that giho is most appropriately translated as “taste,” because this term captures the dispositional characteristics of giho as (...) a mental faculty as well as its mental effects, such as desires, sentiments, and preferences. I then examine Dasan's and Zhu Xi's commentaries on 6A7 and 6A6, to illustrate how Dasan's view of human‐nature‐as‐taste interprets the chapters differently from Zhu Xi's metaphysical account of human‐nature‐as‐Principle, which Dasan considers as unsupported by the philological and contextual grounds. This exploration of Dasan's empirical account of human‐nature‐as‐taste, serving as a preliminary for a philosophical study of his reinterpretation of the Confucian Classics and his performative account of moral self‐cultivation, will provide us with an alternative perspective to the Neo‐Confucian metaphysic‐epistemic account of human nature. (shrink)

Moral arguments were the type of theistic argument most characteristic of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More recently they have become one of philosophy’s abandoned farms. The fields are still fertile, but they have not been cultivated systematically since the latest methods came in. The rambling Victorian farmhouse has not been kept up as well as similar structures, and people have not been stripping the sentimental gingerbread off the porches to reveal the clean lines of argument. This paper (...) is intended to contribute to the remedy of this neglect. It will deal with quite a number of arguments, because I think we can understand them better if we place them in relation to each other. This will not leave time to be as subtle, historically or philosophically, as I would like to be, but I hope I will be able to prove something more than my own taste for Victoriana. (shrink)

At the beginning of modern times, taste was seen as a sort of sense of sociability, indistinctly moral and aesthetic. Why, during the eighteenth century did it become exclusively the sense of beauty? To understand this change, this article maintains that we must consider the great revolution, which affected the idea of beauty between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, that is to say the end of the metaphysical conception of beauty. We must analyse the phenomenon of beauty (...) aestheticisation produced by the modern subjectivist, psychological and empirical perspective. The aestheticisation of taste is one of the consequences of the underground ontological revolution, which led to a transformation of the transcendental essences in human values. When beauty is nothing more than beauty, and does not exist without a sensitive experience, one needs a sensitive faculty which enables one to grasp beauty, or more precisely, which gives birth to beauty, seeing beauty as no longer having a proper ontological consistency. (shrink)

Most moral theories share certain features in common with other theories. They consist of a set of propositions that are universal, general, and hence impartial. The propositions that constitute a typical moral theory are (1) universal, in that they apply to all subjects designated as within their scope. They are (2) general, in that they include no proper names or definite descriptions. They are therefore (3) impartial, in that they accord no special privilege to any particular agent's situation (...) which cannot be justified under (2) and (3). These three features do not distinguish moral theories from other theories, nor indeed from most general categorical propositions we assert. Yet, in recent years, these features of moral theories have been the target of a certain concerted and sustained criticism, namely, that to be committed to such a moral theory, or to aspire to act in accordance with its requirements, results in what has come to be known as moral alienation. Moral alienation, according to this criticism, consists in (i) viewing one's ground projects from an impersonal, "moral point of view" engendered by one's acceptance of the theory; (ii) being prepared to sacrifice these projects to the requirements of moral principle; and (iii) making such a sacrifice specifically and self-consciously in order to conform to these requirements. Moral alienation is said to manifest itself in one (or both) of two ways, depending on the nature of the project thus susceptible to sacrifice. One may be alienated from oneself, if the project consists of tastes, convictions, or aspirations that are centrally definitive of one's self. In this case one's commitment to the project can be at best conditional on its congruence with one's moral theory. It is claimed that this must make for a rather tepid and unenthusiastic commitment indeed. Alternatively, one may be alienated from others, if the project is an interpersonal relationship such as a friendship, marriage, or collegial relationship. In this case one's responses to the other are motivated by one's awareness of what one's moral theory requires. It is claimed that this obstructs a genuine and unmediated emotional response to the other as such. My aim here will be to argue that this very compelling criticism - call it the moral-alienation criticism - is nevertheless misdirected. The real culprit is not any particular moral theory, but rather a certain familiar personality type that may or may not adopt it. (shrink)

This article argues that Hume's brief essay, "Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion," offers resources for three claims: (1) Delicate taste correlates with self-sufficiency and thus with a particularly Humean form of Magnanimity -- greatness of mind; (2) Delicate taste improves the capacity for profound friendships, characterized by mutual admiration and true compassion; and (3) magnanimity and compassion are thus not necessarily in tension with one another and may even proceed from and support harmony of character. (...) These claims, in turn, provide reasons to take seriously Hume's view that moral character depends, in part, on aesthetic character. (shrink)

We report the results of two studies that examine folk metaethical judgments about the objectivity of morality. We found that participants attributed almost as much objectivity to ethical statements as they did to statements of physical fact and significantly more objectivity to ethical statements than to statements about preferences or tastes. In both studies, younger participants attributed less objectivity to ethical statements than older participants. Females were observed to attribute slightly less objectivity to ethical statements than males, and we found (...) important interactions between attributions of objectivity and other factors, such as how strong participants’ moral opinions were and how much disagreement about the issue they perceived to exist within society. We believe our results have significant implications for debates about the nature of folk morality and about the nature of morality in general. (shrink)

Kant uses the concept of the symbol to show the complicated relationship between the autonomy of beauty and its systematic function as a transition from nature to freedom, which are the two most important topics in the third Critique. Beauty’s symbolism of morality lies in the analog between aesthetic reflection and moral disposition; concretely, it lies in the purity or disinterestedness and self-legislation as negative and positive freedom in both subjective states of mind. In this scenario, beauty’s symbolism does (...) not refer to aesthetic ideas that either involve intelligent interests (in the beauty of nature) or presuppose an end (in the beauty of art); it also cannot be grounded in the supersensible substrate, which is an elevated and metaphysical principle of the judgment of taste given in the Dialectic but not the original principle of subjective purposiveness in the Analytic. With this formal relationship, beauty and morality accelerate each other in the empirical-anthological sense—but they are also not a sufficient or necessary condition for each other. Furthermore, through symbolism, taste looks toward the intelligible and serves as a transition from nature to freedom from the transcendental perspective. (shrink)

Allison begins this book by observing that although the eighteenth century is often called the “age of reason,” it has also been called the “century of taste.” There is a clear enough connection, however, between the two names, for anyone with eyes open enough to see it. For the phenomenon of taste—of likings and dislikings conforming to sharable standards, and invited or sought from others precisely for the sake of sharing them universally—was recognized by eighteenth-century rationalists, and certainly (...) by Kant, as a necessary adjunct or perhaps even a precondition for universally valid judgments based on reason, about science or morality or politics. Taste was also seen by them as overcoming the division between reason and sensation, and thus of making human beings whole; it is a way for reason to gain access to people’s feelings and motives, hence a precondition for it to shape their conduct. For Kant, a critique of aesthetic judgment is the inquiry in which the “great gulf” between knowledge and practice, theoretical understanding and moral reason is to be overcome and philosophy itself is to be made whole. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“An Immoderate Taste for Truth”: Censoring History in Baudelaire’s “Les bijoux”E. S. Burt (bio)In May 1949, a French Court of Appeals reversed an 1857 decision condemning six poems from Les fleurs du mal for obscenity, in a signal case of a public lifting of a ban against some lyric poems. 1 Among the several interesting features of this case not the least is the decision to proceed against (...) the work in the first place. For lyric poetry does not appear an attractive target for censorship. Its subject matter and formalism remove it far enough from the experience of most readers that Gustave Flaubert, fresh from his troubles with the court over Madame Bovary, could express his surprise at the government’s attack: “This is new,” he wrote to Baudelaire, “this pursuit of a volume of verse.” While Flaubert’s comment was in point of fact inaccurate, he puts his finger on a problem worth considering. 2 Here we have a work that must seem naturally exempt from state intervention, by virtue of a deliberate retreat from risky political subjects, and it nonetheless did get censored by the state. Can anything be learned about “normal” state censorship from this exceptional case? [End Page 19]A key factor in the government’s decision to pursue the book, according to the prosecutor Pinard, was that these poems would prove accessible to a large audience: 3 “An immoral book that had no chance of being read or understood would not be pursued” [1208], he states. In his argument, as in the judgment by the court that the condemned poems “lead necessarily to the exciting of the senses by a coarse realism offensive to modesty” [1182], the assumption is that the work is extraordinarily available, its pictures immediately referable to ordinary experience. In the six condemned poems, language is judged to be not a veil but a tool, and a sex tool at that. “Despite an effort of style” [1182], the poetic situation—in most of the poems that of the boudoir—is painted in a language insufficiently flowery. 4A further interesting feature in the case is that when it comes up again, under DeGaulle’s Fourth Republic, the court summarily dismisses the 1857 judgment of coarse realism as just one possible interpretation, and a forced one at that. Instead, the 1949 court finds that the poems are self-referential, symbolic entities that do not represent ordinary experience:If some pictures, on account of their originality, were able to alarm some minds upon first publication and appeared to the first judges as offensive to morality, such an appraisal, attaching itself only to a realistic interpretation of the poems and neglecting their symbolic meaning, has proved to be of an arbitrary character, unratified by public opinion or by the judgment of the literary world.[St. John-Stevas 249]The shocking representations of 1857, outraging morality, are now understood to deliver the Wordsworthian “shock of mild surprise” by which we recognize the original work of art. In 1949, the poems are precious artifacts; their language is not realistic but symbolical; its sensuous forms reveal an inner, spiritual meaning.A crucial resemblance can be discerned between the actions taken by the two courts: both make their judgments in terms of a “reading pact,” a set of “artificial rules” [1206] that are presumed to govern reading and to have currency in the context. Les fleurs gets policed in the name of this generic purity, with the prosecutor Pinard calling “the judge... a sentinel who must not let the border be crossed” [1206] and the 1949 decision confirming the opinion of the literary world that the supposed transgression against public morality was in point of fact a transformation in the rules regulating the narrow confines of lyric poetry. 5This concern that texts be framed by a reading pact aimed at constraining their interpretation is worth considering in any discussion of censorship that wants to move from the level of pragmatics to that of theory. It leads to queries about the possibility of getting rid of state censorship entirely and about the state’s interest, as guardian and overseer of the archive, in the institutionalization and... (shrink)

Against interpretations of Kant that would assimilate the universality claim in judgments of taste either to moral demands or to theoretical assertions, I argue that it is for Kant a normative requirement shared with ordinary empirical judgments. This raises the question of why the universal agreement required by a judgment of taste should consist in the sharing of a feeling, rather than simply in the sharing of a thought. Kant’s answer is that in a judgment of (...) class='Hi'>taste, a feeling assumes the role of predicate. Such a solution presents a problem as serious as the one it purports to solve. (shrink)

Kant and the Claims of Taste, published here for the first time in paperback in a revised version, has become, since its initial publication in 1979, the standard commentary on Kant's aesthetic theory. The book offers a detailed account of Kant's views on judgments of taste, aesthetic pleasure, imagination and many other topics. For this new edition, Paul Guyer has provided a new foreword and has added a chapter on Kant's conception of fine art. This re-issue will complement (...) the author's companion volume, Kant and the Experience of Freedom, which places Kant's aesthetics in its historical context and examines the fundamental connection between Kant's aesthetics and his moral theory. (shrink)

To what extent do aesthetic taste and our interest in the arts constitute who we are? In this paper, we present a series of empirical findings that suggest an Aesthetic Self Effect supporting the claim that our aesthetic engagements are a central component of our identity. Counterfactual changes in aesthetic preferences, for example, moving from liking classical music to liking pop, are perceived as altering us as a person. The Aesthetic Self Effect is as strong as the impact of (...) moral changes, such as altering political partisanship or religious orientation, and significantly stronger than for other categories of taste, such as food preferences. Using a multidimensional scaling technique to map perceived aesthetic similarities among musical genres, we determined that aesthetic distances between genres correlate highly with the perceived difference in identity. Further studies generalize the Aesthetic Self Effect beyond the musical domain: general changes in visual art preferences, for example from more traditional to abstract art, also elicited a strong Self Effect. Exploring the breadth of this effect we also found an Anaesthetic Self Effect. That is, hypothetical changes from aesthetic indifference to caring about music, art, or beauty are judged to have a significant impact on identity. This effect on identity is stronger for aesthetic fields compared to leisure activities, such as hiking or playing video games. Across our studies, the Anaesthetic Self Effect turns out to be stronger than the Aesthetic Self Effect. Taken together, we found evidence for a link between aesthetics and identity: we are aesthetic selves. When our tastes in music and the arts or our aesthetic interests change we take these to be transformative changes. (shrink)

Necessity can be ascribed not only to propositions, but also to feelings. In the Critique of Judgment (KdU), Immanuel Kant argues that a feeling of beauty is the necessary satisfaction instantiated by the ‘free play’ of the cognitive faculties, which provides the grounds for a judgment of taste (KdU 5:196, 217-19). In contradistinction to the theoretical necessity of the Critique of Pure Reason and the moral necessity of the Critique of Practical Reason, the necessity assigned to a judgment (...) of taste is exemplary necessity (KdU 5:237). Necessity can also be assigned by employing the de re/de dicto distinction, namely, by ascribing entailments of what must necessarily hold to either a thing (de re) or to a proposition (de dicto). Although Kant does not use the distinction in any of the three Critiques, this omission has not prevented Kant scholars from applying the distinction in their analyses of the first two Critiques. In this paper, I examine the role that modality plays in Kant’s third Critique and I attempt to bring the de re/de dicto distinction to bear on Kant’s famous aesthetic theory. Ultimately, I perform a retrospective classification of the modality of taste by arguing that because a judgment of taste is not a statement about an objective fact, a judgment of ‘x is beautiful’ can only be read as de dicto necessary. (shrink)

Can we adequately account for our reasons of mere taste without holding that our desires ground such reasons? Recently, Scanlon and Parfit have argued that we can, pointing to pleasure and pain as the grounds of such reasons. In this paper I take issue with each of their accounts. I conclude that we do not yet have a plausible rival to a desire-based understanding of the grounds of such reasons.

Is the possession of taste relevant to the practice of moral and political judgement? For Mary Wollstonecraft and many of her contemporaries, the formation of taste was increasingly significant for both ethics and politics. In fact, some of the key contributors to the debate, which I have termed the ‘politics of taste’, believed that fostering existing standards of taste promised a palliative to modern democratic ills that they diagnosed. Wollstonecraft is an immanent critic of such (...) positions. Although she shares some of Edmund Burke’s and David Hume’s assumptions, she proposes dramatic revision of the extant model of refined taste driven by the spread of rational education. In this way, she attempts to rescue ‘true taste’ from its sentimental context – one permeated by false assumptions about femininity and class. For Wollstonecraft, ‘true taste’ must be the product of refined understanding. Only then can it be deemed a support rather than a hindrance to the practice of moral and political judgement. Although recent Wollstonecraft scholarship has emphasised the depth of her engagement with Scottish Enlightenment thought, using Hume as a primary interlocutor with Wollstonecraft, especially on the question of taste, is yet unprecedented. This approach, Wollstonecraft’s immanent critique of taste, yields arguments about taste that are especially complex and philosophically interesting, both in her time and ours. (shrink)

This paper considers whether proposition – “x is not immoral but it is in poor taste” – is morally contradictory when considered from the standpoint of constructive ecumenical expressivism. According to CEE, pronouncements about poor taste and immorality have the following in common: they each convey a negative attitude towards x and intimate that x ought not to be done. Given this, P1 is vulnerable to a charge of contradiction, as it intimates that x is both something and (...) not something that ought not to be done. To avoid the putative contradiction, it is argued that an accusation of poor taste amounts to a negative attitude towards the treatment of a morally pertinent matter, thereby making the former parasitic on the latter. A morally relevant means of distinguishing between poor taste and immorality is therefore provided that endorses the expressivist tradition, and provides an account of societal norms. (shrink)

Taste, according to Hans, governs our lives. It determines the choices we make in life, the judgments we pass on other people and their actions, the patterns and rhythms of our existence. For such a large claim, one would expect a rigorous account of what taste is and a convincing explanation of the ontological, aesthetic, and moral roles that Hans attributes to it. Unfortunately, the reader will be disappointed. To be sure, Hans tells us that he wants (...) to “resist defining the word” but promises to make the word “richer over the course of the book”, as he thought he did with the word “play” in his first book. However, the reader is likely to feel that, over the course of this book, the word “taste” either has been rendered too rich to be digestible or remains too bland to justify Hans’s own “great claims for taste”. The introduction gives a number of apparently inconsistent characterizations of taste that the patient reader hopes will somehow be made consistent by the end of the book, such as “taste is an inborn capacity”, “Taste is shaped by experience, by cultural milieu, by the historical circumstances”, and “taste is a function of biological mechanisms”. Taste is also said to be a capacity, a faculty, a mechanism, and a device. By the end of the introduction, we already have a rich brew which ironically threatens to produce a bland concept, the concept of “taste [as] everything”. (shrink)

Were I not afraid of appearing too philosophical, I should remind my reader of that famous doctrine, supposed to be fully proved in modern times, “That tastes and colours, and all other sensible qualities, lie not in the bodies, but merely in the senses.” The case is the same with beauty and deformity, virtue and vice. This doctrine, however, takes off no more from the reality of the latter qualities, than from that of the former; nor need it give any (...) umbrage either to critics or moralists. Though colours were allowed to lie only in the eye, would dyers or painters ever be less regarded or esteemed? There is a sufficient uniformity in the senses and feelings of mankind, to make all these qualities the objects of art and reasoning, and to have the greatest influence on life and manners. And as it is certain, that the discovery above-mentioned in natural philosophy, makes no alteration on action and conduct; why should a like discovery in moral philosophy make any alteration? (shrink)

Blame is multifarious. It can be passionate or dispassionate. It can be expressed or kept private. We blame both the living and the dead. And we blame ourselves as well as others. What’s more, we blame ourselves, not only for our moral failings, but also for our non-moral failings: for our aesthetic bad taste, gustatory self-indulgence, or poor athletic performance. And we blame ourselves both for things over which we exerted agential control (e.g., our voluntary acts) and (...) for things over which we lacked such control (e.g., our desires, beliefs, and intentions). I argue that, despite this manifest diversity in our blaming practices, it’s possible to provide comprehensive account of blame. Indeed, I propose a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that aims to specify blame’s extension in terms of its constitution as opposed to its function. And I argue that this proposal has a number of advantages beyond accounting for blame in all its disparate forms. For one, it can account for the fact that one’s having had control over whether one was to φ is a necessary condition for one’s being fittingly blamed for having φ-ed. For another, it can account for why, unlike fitting shame, fitting blame is always deserved, which in turn explains why there is something morally problematic about ridding oneself of one’s fitting self-blame (e.g., one’s fitting guilt). (shrink)

This essay investigates the structure and meaning of the Mengzi’s 孟子 analogical inferences in Mengzi 6A7. In this chapter, he argues that just as the perceptual masters allowed the discovery of our senses’ uniform preferences, the sages enabled us to recognize our hearts’ universal preferences for “order and righteousness.” Regarding an unresolved question of how the sages help us understand our hearts’ preferred objects as such, I propose a spectator-based moral artisanship reading as an alternative to an evaluator-focused (...) class='Hi'>moral connoisseurship view: the sages are moral artisans who refine their moral achievements, and people’s uniform approval of their achievements—firmly associated with “order and righteousness”—demonstrates our hearts’ same natural preferences for them. Furthermore, I argue that this chapter’s conclusion—we and the sages are of the same kind with natural moral preferences—implies the necessity of our transition from passive spectators to active moral performers for moral self-cultivation. (shrink)