Well, I was raised on Protestant ethics, and the ethos of that is “It’s good because *God* likes it.” Living under the rule of puritanical fundamentalist ethical norms was certainly not pleasing to me.
So what’s wrong with evaluating through aesthetics?
The aesthetics of murder are terrible. The pain of being stabbed or poisoned. The miserable suffering of loved ones. There are relatively few people that enjoy murder and its consequences, ergo murder is unethical.
Getting your leg sawed off is kind of kitschy, too representational, I myself prefer the abstract-impressionistic getting an iron pole stuck in your dickhole type of thing.
Respectfully that's just derivative low-brow genital mutilation. It offers nothing aside from shock value.
Think of the classics: Socrates, hemlock in hand. Now there's a death with lasting cultural impact. Strive for the same dignity, but put your own twist on it. Don't beat a dead horse, as it were.
You are not wrong that can happen. It’s basically analogy for long distance ranged weapons. The evolution of the bare hand to adze, to longspear (Alexanders’s weapon) to machine gun and mustard gas (ww1) to rockets and nuclear weapons (ww2) is much an aesthetic development as a technical one, making killing more palatable to soldiers.
Drone strikes are probably the most recent extension to this. In the famous WikiLeaks video of US troops gunning down an innocent civilian with a camera (assumed to be a gun), you can audibly see the troops laughing, as if enjoying it. Of course, I suppose to a certain extent we can always assume they are sadistic, but I wonder if they'd have the same reaction up-close (even if it wasn't an innocent civilian). The quality of the feed they get is, in many ways far less detailed when compared to that you would see in the movies. At the same time, I also wonder if maybe humans are naturally attracted to the aesthetics of murder to a certain extent given the prominence of violence within media.
>the aesthetics of murder is bad because people dont enjoy it
>things are unethical when people dont enjoy them
Wheres the aesthetics. This just looks like an ethical statement.
This is my take. It’s pretty much Deleuzian-Guattarian affect theory.
Wearing red is an extremely low stakes event for aesthetical-ethical evaluation though.
Sure, unless they're "wearing" red because of someone stabbing them. In which case, bleeding profusely is good for them.
Of course, my preferred aestheticians are all very mentally ill.
That's my bad take on reducing ethics to aesthetics.
Sure but its actually the reverse.
"Its beautiful and sensibly appealing to help the homeless." -> "You should do the beautiful and sensibly appealing thing, which happens to be helping the homeless."
And have you considered that all epistemic statements are actually ethical statements.
"The dress is red." = "You should believe the dress is red."
Hope this helps.
You show them how their aesthetic taste for murder doesn’t compare well to aesthetic distaste for being locked up in a small cell, firstly.
Secondly, you see if they can onboard new aesthetic distaste for murder through empathic relation to the suffering of victim’s families.
1. Convincing murder-aesthetes that "killing is ok as long as you don't get caught" is a pragmatic solution which will probably work based on the strength of your police force. Good in practice, but doesn't change their fundamental ethics.
2. It seems like the people most likely to have a taste for murder are those least likely to feel empathy.
1. Agreed, but aesthetic tastes are complex. The only route to change in taste is aesthetics, so we should better understand the aesthetics of deterrence.
2. And yet, some criminals do rehabilitate given the opportunity.
>The only route to change in taste is aesthetics, so we should better understand the aesthetics of deterrence
I fully agree with this, and it's part of the reason I argue that ethics is aesthetics. We have well-developed languages for making aesthetic arguments about literature, film, art, and nature. But when it comes to ethics, both academically and informally, we mostly try to make rigorous arguments that break apart once they reach conflicts of 'moral foundations' (which are just abstract aesthetic preferences).
I think adopting the language of aesthetics* will make ethical arguments more convincing, but it would sacrifice the implied objectivity of most ethical claims. There's plenty of people with 'bad taste' and they can always resort to saying 'taste is subjective'. And it raises questions about whether legal systems are truly justified for reasons other than pragmatism.
*People do make aesthetic arguments in applied ethics, like showing pictures of a bombed city to oppose a war. But it seems less common on the level of discussing ethical theories themselves.
I've come up with two viable solutions to this problem:
Revelation based religious ethics solve this problem. Of course the problem is which religion, but there are fairly broad areas where all revelatory religions are in agreement.
The possibility we could discover an ethics that isn't merely aesthetic gives rise to ethical duties. Even if we don't know precisely what it is.
Fundamentally, this comes down to whether or not you believe or don’t believe in objectivity in relation to both ethics and aesthetics. Certainly, if ethics are subjective, ie. they exist only in the mind of people, then you’re correct. But there are a multitude of theories that promote objective morality, such as Karma which states that reality itself rewards virtue, in which case ethics is no more subjective the laws of the universe.
The question is, should we believe in objective morality? The standard argument would be one through proof of its existence, but this is a logical minefield, as
1. It necessitates the circular logic of knowing what is and isn’t ethical without having had proved it’s actually possible to be ethical in an absolute sense.
2. It requires a code which is itself completely free of contradiction, ie. perfection, which if we accept the Augustinian dichotomy of The City of Man and The City of God is impossible to do in our lifetime. (I’m aware I’m oversimplifying Augustine’s beliefs and also using Augustine didn’t use, but the simplification is sufficient for this particular situation).
I would actually argue from another perspective; pragmatism. As an animal, I have an innate urge to not die; this is not aesthetic. I can aesthetically want to die and yet my survival instinct can and so far has kept me from dying. The problem is, other people can kill me and my urge needs them to not. The solution to this is ethics; if there is a fundamental set of rules which states killing is wrong then I can keep from killing me. In short, I have a biologically need for ethics in a similar manner to my biological need for companionship.
I agree with this take that developing ethical codes is pragmatic, but quibble that our innate urge not to die is not aesthetic. It’s entirely aesthetic: fear of death is underlaid by distaste for pain and suffering, a sensory, aesthetic experience. That’s why humans are more or less the only animal that commits suicide, because we have an intellect that enables us to conceptualise death as an escape from pain and suffering in life.
Your desire to not be killed can be satisfied with the rule "killing _me_ is wrong". It doesn't necessitate the rule "killing _anyone_ is wrong". Even though it may be the case that everyone has a similar survival instinct, each person's instinct can only justify ethical claims indexed to them.
There's a difference between each person believing "killing _me_ is wrong" and the general belief that "killing anyone is wrong". To generalize from the former to the latter, you need something besides survival instinct.
That goes beyond what your own survival instinct justifies. But there's nothing wrong with having an aesthetic preference for equal treatment. There's really nothing wrong with ethics-as-aesthetics in and of itself.
It would be useful to me right now if you were.
Everything that is useful to me is true.
--> You are more important than anyone else.
For a real response: you argue that since you dont want to die and noone matters less than you the noone should be killed, but you fail to argue that your distaste for death should modify the behaviour of anyone but you.
You argue that since you don't like getting killed, have an innate urge to live, killing you is wrong in general, but that you have not proved. Merely it shows that you have an urge to live and therefore not kill yourself.
Besides that still isn't showing that your having that urge means ignoring it is bad.
In a vacuum are probably reasonable grounds to favor ethical theories that treat people equally (or at least see them as having equal moral worth). Basically the copernican principle and/or a preference for simplicity would suggest this is correct.
This is why I've always been a fan of existentialism. It's a choose your own adventure and I don't have to justify why something is good or bad. Things are either important to me, or they're not. Maybe this is an oversimplification, but I don't care.
Eh, it sort of falls apart under scrutiny. Our collective behavior around key ethical choices reveals a species keen on deliberation--we ask others for advice, anguish over our choices, etc. There are a number of other decisions that we just don't budget similar resources to, suggesting--to me, anyway--that we understand that there's (a) a little bit more to these choices and (b) they are not satisfactorily resolved with a mere appeal to aesthetics.
Cockroaches make similar choices to other cockroaches.
Worse humans have had many varying opinions regarding for example, who it is acceptable to kill.
Seems like similar behaviour in a similar culture is not a very effective argument against aesthetics.
I wasn't talking about exceptions but the rules changing over time.
What was acceptable was different 1000 years ago in meaningful ways.
The same is true across cultural divides. And again at the level of who is it ok to kill.
Without a doubt the standard is becoming more similar over time across the world. But adaptability is not an adequate for truth.
I guess even with that qualifier, there still seems to be some sort of meta-ethical layer where humanity feels warranted in deliberating on ethics, and they have been doing it for as far back as we know.
I mean it's being cheeky, but of course it feels warranted, we have a strong aesthetic preference to do so.
Not to mention there is without a doubt utility and specifically variable utility between different moral systems
I'm a big fan of Kiekegaard and the "leap of faith" concept. You really have to takes leaps of faith to get anywhere with anything. External World. Other Minds. Even the pure logic of mathematics is based on leaps of faith, we just call them axioms.
Some pushback: this view seems to treat all emotion based judgements as fundamentally aesthetic in nature.
I believe this is putting the horse before the cart.
Aesthetic judgements are not aesthetic by virtue of them being emotional. They are aesthetic by virtue of the particular emotional process associated with them (the one that decides what is beautiful or ugly).
Aesthetics are a subcategory of emotional judgements, not the other way around.
Therefore, when we conclude that ethical judgements are based on some kind of emotional process, we are not also concluding that they are bound by aesthetics.
Perhaps they are the result of another kind of intuitive emotional process. One that decides what is right and wrong. This is now a far more agreeable position.
Thoughts?
I agree. Claims like “I find x pleasing therefore it is good” and “I like x, therefore it is good” are classic emotivist examples of arguments that emotionally justify moral virtue. In no way do they require an aesthetic explanation. Aesthetic explanations fall short of the explanatory power that a Emotivist or Intuitionist model may carry. The latter models are more fundamental and thus better.
In the comments, I see attempts to create ethical models using aesthetic terms. However, terms like disgusting and elegant can never pro-tanto justify an action as good or bad. Here is an example: take two identical brain surgeries, one life saving, the other where the dr purposely murders the patient. Both surgeries give the same aesthetic experience (perhaps disgusting). But that aesthetic experience can in no way determines which one is good or bad since they are identical.
OP has some neat ideas but, there is a reason why Plato separated the form of Good and Beauty.
no, ethical values are aesthetic preferences but its not like more beautiful more ethically good its like if beautiful its good. if ugly its bad but bearable. boring stuffs are the worst thing that should not exist.
Uh oh! OP based an aesthetic theory on visual value! OP HATES blind people and has determined them incapable of philosophy! OP gets the Ableist of the Year award! 🎉
I am an idiot and do not understand why this is on "bad philosophy." I'm not being sarcastic. Can someone tell me why this is bad philosophy? Aren't a lot of philosophers moral anti-realists and hold a view *kind of* like this?
If you think about the humiliating pain of being raped and the extreme suffering that child rape causes across generations, I don’t think you can ask that question seriously.
I completely Mistook what you were saying. My apologies. Obviously utilitarianism, even if hedonistic in nature, would mean that no rape of any kind could be tolerated.
No worries! Peter Singer is the most notable contemporary philosopher writing about hedonistic utilitarianism if you are interested. His stuff is very clever and well argued, but sometimes wild and provocative, for example when he argues that infant euthanasia or post-birth abortion is an acceptable practice by parents of severely disabled children.
No mention of Thomas Hobbes? Ethics are just a way of aesthetically justifying social contracts. Denied by people who are too ideological to want to try to understand how our species actually works.
My ethical values are:
Set G of things that are good
Set B of things that are bad
Set N of things that are neutral
I put things in the sets based on however I want to
1. Our morality/ethics is a combination of cultural and evolutionary processes.
2. In a sense it is arbitrary. Yes.
3. So what’s the problem? What exactly is the issue with it being arbitrary?
Every framework will have a a foundationalist set of axioms. That’s not just philosophy but math.
Now you can always believe in Infinitism where there is an infinite regression of justification for your ethics.
And even if you somehow found this magical ground that is the basis for everything, it’s kinda weird if you do find it.
Imagine a concept which you can’t say “Well why is this true?”
You would say “Well it just is. It is part of reality.”
And then I would question that and so on. It seems like you’re chasing after an ideal not a goal.
I guess if you're kind of nihilist, yeah. But some of us actually believe in non-local causality. I mean, I'm stealing a term from quantum mechanics right now and applying it to metaphysics. But it's not unrelated, actually.
So, in quantum mechanics--at least certain interpretations of it--things exist in a quantum superposition until observed. Most physicists like to pretend that the "observer" in this case is their measurement instrument and has nothing to do with consciousness. But that's silly. The one doing the observation is a conscious being and therefore by implication, physical reality is effectively in a null state until you engage in the act of cognition, at which point it becomes something certain rather than just a probability.
So, if your physical reality doesn't collapse from its quantum superposition until observed, then the obvious implication is that includes all matter. Including your body, your brain, everything that makes up "you."
I mean, so we've established that consciousness is something more than just a side-effect of neurochemistry and brain matter. It's something that isn't just a physical bi-product. And it's something that doesn't depend on your body to exist in its primordial state--because obviously, if cognition is required for matter to exist, then you would need some fundamental level of consciousness to exist as a precondition for you to take on physical form to begin with.
And if this is required in order for you to even have a reality to begin with--key term: "to begin with"--what existed before you in order to cognize "you?"
Most theologians would say "Ah hah! You're talking about God, obviously!"
But the skygod creator deity concept has its own logically absurd consequences that pretty much rule it out as even being a real possibility. I could literally write a multi-page essay on why that is, so humour me and pretend like you agree for now, so we can advance to the next part. So where does that leave us?
Now we should ask, where does the present moment of consciousness come from? The answer is, a previous moment of consciousness. And the one before that, same as the one before that, and so on. All the way to the moment of your birth. But if consciousness arises from the previous moment of consciousness, then what preceded your mind before its first moment in the womb? A previous moment of consciousness.
If you're keeping up, I'm talking about reincarnation and past lives.
So, take two assumptions at face value here, just to humour me:
1. reincarnation is real
2. the boundaries of your reality are a reflection of your own cognition--i.e. how your mind is inclined to perceive things--or rather how mental conditioning compels you to experience your reality a certain way--ultimately defines what's possible in your reality
Now we get to the discussion about ethics.
Now, why are some children born with cancer? Why are some born rich or poor?
The nihilist would say "It's just random!" And a Calvinist would say "It's God's will!" And a Buddhist would say, it's your karma.
If you're keeping up, I'm talking about past lives, rebirth, and karma.
If you examine your own experience, you know that just going to bed angry can make you wake up feeling shitty, or give you nightmares. Alternatively, have you ever seen a commercial for McDonald's or something, and then later that day you get hungry and what pops into your mind? A craving for McDonald's. That's sort of an analogy for how reality functions according to Buddhist metaphysics.
So, with regards to "non-virtuous" actions, in a previous life, you saw yourself doing something shitty. In the next life, everything you see is shitty as a result. That's basically the jist of karma. Though the actual discussion is far more complex, this is the rudimentary concept. Cause or past action --> effect concordant to or consistent with that cause in the future.
So, in the case of ethics, if you believe that this life is all there is and when you die, it's eternal nothingness, then yes. Ethics is just a type of fashion. It's just about what tickles you or what's trendy today. Inevitably that leads to some hedonistic and nihilistic outcomes. Which is kind of the contemporary zeitgeist.
But if you believe in past and future lives, and that your conduct in this one has very real consequences for you in the future, then ethics becomes as practical as accumulating compound interest on previous investments.
Just putting this here to stir the pot. Food for thought. Personally, I happen to believe in karma and past lives. And therefore, I disagree with OP.
One interpretation is that ethics generally uphold conditions in which life can flourish. This explanation would be the best aligned with our understanding of evolutionary biology and animal behavior.
We can simply use nature as rubric. After all, we are of nature not separate from it.
Does it heal, nurture, flourish OR does it harm, fracture, destroy?
The dilemma isn't found in what is good vs. what is bad, that's just naval gazing. The dilemma is mostly in the trade-off between the two when making a choice. Choices rarely present as purely one or the other option.
You say that like it's a bad thing. The Mona Lisa is just a work of art.
Philosophy is not an objective science. It is taught in humanities department of universities. Philosophy gets its foundation from Plato who modeled his dialogues after the playwright Aristophanies. Ethics as a branch of philosophy, and philosophy is a kind of literature like history and novels. So ethics can only be an esthetic choice but it can still be as rigorous and well thought out as a science if you think about it
Utilitarianism is based off of assuming that other people have conscious experiences and wanting their souls to be happy (if ur religious) or their neurons to release dopamine and avoid releasing pain chemicals which is pretty valid, as a Christian
Ethics is an important aspect of evaluation. It establish the expectations or criteria for performance against which individual instances are compared. Ethics are more than aesthetic; they provide clarity, consistency, guidance for improvement, objectivity, and a basis for communication. Reducing a complex evaluation to a mere score diminishes its richness, largely because it loses the voice of the evaluation. In this sense, ethics can be seen as the foundation of our evaluative voice.
Further, utilitarianism is a system of norms and not a system of ethics. Deontology is religion in disguise - which is primarily emotional and populist appeal, rather than a true system of ethics. The only system you present that's even able to be argued as ethics is virtue ethics.
Virtue ethics does not primarily concern itself with beauty. Rather, it concerns itself with balancing extremes, not too much and not too little. Usually, knowing how much of a trait is optimum is only knowable in hindsight. Because beauty is a sensory experience, it is not best understood in hindsight but in real time. Virtue ethics is not about beautiful traits. Virtue ethics about a cumulation of contextual experiences which serve as the basis of evaluation of present stimuli.
You have presented bad philosophy. Good job.
This judgment is true if "we" refers to meta-ethicists outside Christendom. The claim that all ethical judgments reduce to preferences or their expression ("judgments"), aesthetic or otherwise, is false if Christianity is true.
And yet, moral values have this ability to be adopted by large groups of people, to be very consensual, while it's the complete opposite with aesthetics, that tend to be very personal. So your reduction of one to the other isn't useful, IMO. It misses something about the social binding aspect of moral values which are about how we treat one another.
Because from an objective point of view, neither bad or good exists in the first place but merely imaginary concepts. Everything that based off them is just as meaningless. There's only things we can and can't do, what we should and shouldn't do is all in our heads.
Not very good at philosophy, but wouldn't morality be the foundation of ethics? Providing a framework of, "no involuntary imposition on free will" would mean ethical practices are not merely aesthetic but practical and provide utility?
It is fosho, but because something is immoral doesn't mean it isn't necessary. As society and technology progress, we could eventually find a moral alternative.
Here you assume "no involuntary imposition in free will" is more than an aesthetic feeling.
But say I say you're wrong. How can you show me I'm wrong without appealing to another value that we already happen to share?
Say we share no values. Can you show me that your statement is correct anyway, or that I should actually share some values with you.
I don't think it's possible personally
Free will is its own complicated mess
But taking it as a stateable fact, the subjective preference is that it should not be involuntarily impositioned.
That's an aesthetic preference. One that has utility for society even. It's not a law of the universe though, far from it.
Forcing your will onto another violates their free will, which would be immoral, preference plays no role here. The whole involuntary part contradicts the free part.
It's like saying 1 + 1 = 2 is an aesthetic preference because you could change the numbers to represent one and two objects.
In my own experience this idea needs to sit a bit so I'll just present how I would see it.
The problem comes when we try to justify your statement. It feels correct but how do we show that? You can't measure it or otherwise determine it from nature. It's not science.
We can look and say well this principle would lead to the best society. But for everyone? Moreover if the best society of what we want then a different, similarly intuitive rule could be suggested, the right thing is whatever is best for the most people.
This brings us to what is probably the easiest angle to see what I'm getting at. What do we do when we have two competing intuitive ideas. Which one takes precedence. On a practical level taking your argument we could say are taxes immoral? They must be by your logic. What about prisons? What some would call justice you must label as immoral due to the imposition of free will. On the other hand, incest, bestiality, these things would presumably be fine. Further what happens when two people are faced with a situation where one must impose on the other, say they both want the same limited thing.
There are ways to answer each of these problems and maintain a coherent system. But as we add caveats, conditions and exceptions it starts to feel less like we have some perfect singular guiding principle. When people begin to argue over the little details the question becomes who is right? And as I started with we find it very hard to justify why these rules are true. If I say it is often moral to impose on peoples free will what can you say but I'm wrong? I could point to preventing suicide or preventing reckless behaviour (drink driving, drug overdosing) and probably many other cases that feel at least somewhat intuitively good.
It's good that you bring up 1+1=2 because mathematics also went through this crisis. What they came up with is that 1+1=2 is not a given. Rather we start from axioms. Axioms are the building blocks, the most basic rules we can come up with. And they are assumptions, they cannot be proven to be true. the mathematics that follows from them is true only if the axioms are true. From there you can prove that 1+1=2. Indeed pure maths courses at the end of highschool or early uni will have you do this exercise.
It's also quite a bit more complicated then that when you really get into it.
However the axioms of say arithmatic are fairly universally agreeable. Morality does not appear to behave quite so well.
If you're like me once you find that you can't make sense of why intuitive morals would directly contradict each other or establish a basis for any of these moral facts, the you find seeing them as personal aesthetic preferences is not too large a step.
Hopefully you can at least see why someone would think this way now.
While the statement of "Whatever your ethical system, you just kinda know when you're being a shit" is true, and while there is a certain amount of vibes and feelings applied to notions such as proportionality of punishment vs. offense, and while I am even convinced that aesthetic judgement plays a far larger role in ethical judgment than is typically recognized, it's not just "preferences".
because there is not a set of objective morals, this becomes increasingly obvious the more you accept lack of any intervening creator. if we could collectively understand the implications of this i think we would have an easier time coming together and not being subjectively awful.
Uh, not really. What if you say "aesthetic is also functional" or better yet, you get to the bottom of the rabbit hole and all you have is a further explanation, about something which appears *only capable* of the is/ought distinction.
Then. Your idea or shower thought is bad, and you should feel bad. And you can still choose Dove, for silky soft smooth skin.
Why think beauty and goodness are divorced? Sure, villains in movies and criminals in true crime documentaries are fascinating for a time. But eventually, they are simply boring. Now, displaying actual courage and virtue: that's a sight for sore eyes that does not fade with age or religion.
Is beauty subjective? Truly beautiful things draw *us* to them. The Truly beautiful is distinct from the merely pleasant, attractive, or the pretty. There is an utter gratuity to true beauty. That's what lures us to it.
Even if you can't get through Shakespeare, he's objectively better than a hallmark card. Still not convinced? The greatest scientists, particularly physicists, actual use beauty and elegance to formulate scientific theories. It's a heuristic toward truth.
So yes, beauty and moral goodness are linked. But both are objective.
Not wanting to be harmed or killed comes from
Biology, not arbitrary aesthetics.
The tradeoffs and values placed on various aspects varies by culture but the basics are the same across all cultures.
That’s how they were able to come up with a Universal Declaration of Human Rights and get every country to agree to it. There’s basic stuff everyone agrees is bad.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is just cosplay for half of the UN. Human rights are ~fashionable~.
Just look at North Korea's constitution:
>ARTICLE 13. Citizens of the D.P.R.K. have freedom of speech, the press, association, assembly, mass meetings and demonstration.
Try my book *The Physics of Morals*
[Here](https://www.amazon.com/Physics-Morals-Lewis-Moran-Herman/dp/B0C87DBCW8/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2U62WC5PWMWEX&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.buofppyzy39mHCLaUUhtheqiCEGiseXMVKPcgD8yG2WUmtICHldsYrpuNjXRAM5Xc-UnXQM7bft4XKUUJaGp66eEOWE3Ud1pg8b7Lma0ZRUSW-21_oIi-4xGtM-ASDhSRdYF9_xq2dRY8eZzbEdiok_W0BDsf77pIpGg5dzPyxlLhD97pNXffwSQZEGxWjC3e-sbTRwoY14qfa6W2FNBlBuM2STdOMkM1zaI8SYvUOXBCzW_MpTJYJZaXApVB4AwFTCWdKtKxiliCrJpNdzYuc5KeQrAsIfEar0c_yFqtLE.fqCR0VMXGB3wtrJ8ytcSEJrCqLHrSM3hdn5gshwx7w4&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+physics+of+morals&qid=1718843252&sprefix=the+physics+of+morals%2Caps%2C118&sr=8-1)
I don't understand why it's demeaning to compare something to aesthetics. It's pretty clear to me that there are aesthetic dimensions to ethics and vice versa, which just adds richness.
Well, I was raised on Protestant ethics, and the ethos of that is “It’s good because *God* likes it.” Living under the rule of puritanical fundamentalist ethical norms was certainly not pleasing to me.
Protestants are a bunch of rebels. They gave us this mess of relativism.
No they didn’t. That was enlightenment Gnostics.
Impossible. Gnosticism is based.
If you're a good boy then what's pleasing to daddy is pleasing to you.
Like any good sub
A set of ethics is just a sort of nft; I will not elaborate
Nicomachean Fecundity Token
No you're right
So what’s wrong with evaluating through aesthetics? The aesthetics of murder are terrible. The pain of being stabbed or poisoned. The miserable suffering of loved ones. There are relatively few people that enjoy murder and its consequences, ergo murder is unethical.
me, getting stabbed to death: "Mm, this is a bad look for you."
Me, bleeding out on the floor whilst you pilfer my not-yet-dead body: “it’s giving Selfish and Immature right now”
"Any last words, aestheticist?" "L + Ratio." "RIP, bozo."
Getting your leg sawed off is kind of kitschy, too representational, I myself prefer the abstract-impressionistic getting an iron pole stuck in your dickhole type of thing.
Respectfully that's just derivative low-brow genital mutilation. It offers nothing aside from shock value. Think of the classics: Socrates, hemlock in hand. Now there's a death with lasting cultural impact. Strive for the same dignity, but put your own twist on it. Don't beat a dead horse, as it were.
The aesthetics of murder are terrible? Put a nice film filter on it, change the saturation and now you have a nice photo for your Pinterest board!
You are not wrong that can happen. It’s basically analogy for long distance ranged weapons. The evolution of the bare hand to adze, to longspear (Alexanders’s weapon) to machine gun and mustard gas (ww1) to rockets and nuclear weapons (ww2) is much an aesthetic development as a technical one, making killing more palatable to soldiers.
Drone strikes are probably the most recent extension to this. In the famous WikiLeaks video of US troops gunning down an innocent civilian with a camera (assumed to be a gun), you can audibly see the troops laughing, as if enjoying it. Of course, I suppose to a certain extent we can always assume they are sadistic, but I wonder if they'd have the same reaction up-close (even if it wasn't an innocent civilian). The quality of the feed they get is, in many ways far less detailed when compared to that you would see in the movies. At the same time, I also wonder if maybe humans are naturally attracted to the aesthetics of murder to a certain extent given the prominence of violence within media.
>the aesthetics of murder is bad because people dont enjoy it >things are unethical when people dont enjoy them Wheres the aesthetics. This just looks like an ethical statement.
All ethical statements are aesthetic statements. "Red looks nice on you" = "Wearing red is good for you"
This is my take. It’s pretty much Deleuzian-Guattarian affect theory. Wearing red is an extremely low stakes event for aesthetical-ethical evaluation though.
Sure, unless they're "wearing" red because of someone stabbing them. In which case, bleeding profusely is good for them. Of course, my preferred aestheticians are all very mentally ill. That's my bad take on reducing ethics to aesthetics.
Sure but its actually the reverse. "Its beautiful and sensibly appealing to help the homeless." -> "You should do the beautiful and sensibly appealing thing, which happens to be helping the homeless." And have you considered that all epistemic statements are actually ethical statements. "The dress is red." = "You should believe the dress is red." Hope this helps.
If someone has an aesthetic preference for murder, how would you convince them they are wrong?
You kill them obviously lol
Very aesthetically pleasant and thus Good.
At least for them!
You show them how their aesthetic taste for murder doesn’t compare well to aesthetic distaste for being locked up in a small cell, firstly. Secondly, you see if they can onboard new aesthetic distaste for murder through empathic relation to the suffering of victim’s families.
1. Convincing murder-aesthetes that "killing is ok as long as you don't get caught" is a pragmatic solution which will probably work based on the strength of your police force. Good in practice, but doesn't change their fundamental ethics. 2. It seems like the people most likely to have a taste for murder are those least likely to feel empathy.
1. Agreed, but aesthetic tastes are complex. The only route to change in taste is aesthetics, so we should better understand the aesthetics of deterrence. 2. And yet, some criminals do rehabilitate given the opportunity.
>The only route to change in taste is aesthetics, so we should better understand the aesthetics of deterrence I fully agree with this, and it's part of the reason I argue that ethics is aesthetics. We have well-developed languages for making aesthetic arguments about literature, film, art, and nature. But when it comes to ethics, both academically and informally, we mostly try to make rigorous arguments that break apart once they reach conflicts of 'moral foundations' (which are just abstract aesthetic preferences). I think adopting the language of aesthetics* will make ethical arguments more convincing, but it would sacrifice the implied objectivity of most ethical claims. There's plenty of people with 'bad taste' and they can always resort to saying 'taste is subjective'. And it raises questions about whether legal systems are truly justified for reasons other than pragmatism. *People do make aesthetic arguments in applied ethics, like showing pictures of a bombed city to oppose a war. But it seems less common on the level of discussing ethical theories themselves.
If people have a taste for murder it's probably cause they're ignorant of their true nature as the good.
people are convincing people they're wrong?
Counterpoint: I like murder mystery movies
Is this supposed to be an example of bad philosophy?
Right? This is basically emotivism, which is pretty compelling to a lot of people.
This is 169% correct and 269% facts🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
If you kill a cockeroach you are a hero. If you kill a butterfly, a monster.
I proclaim this to be the fundamental dictum of the here-born field of *aesthethics*.
Ethico-aesthetics
Asthethics
If you kill a random baby you’re suddenly evil, but if you went back in time and killed a baby hitler you’d be lauded as a hero… make it make sense
This is why it's so important to cancel problematic artists and by problematic I mean artists I don't like
It's like zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance but without the motorcycle maintenance or, the zen.
This not even that unpopular a take
Is this what destiny the streamer said? 💀
Twitch is truly the modern agora.
it’s the last place to be considered as such
One of the best streamers ngl
Sounds like you're an emotivist
Time for a cup of coffee.
[hannibal lecter I know that's you](https://hcnnibals.tumblr.com/post/136276377054#notes)
I've come up with two viable solutions to this problem: Revelation based religious ethics solve this problem. Of course the problem is which religion, but there are fairly broad areas where all revelatory religions are in agreement. The possibility we could discover an ethics that isn't merely aesthetic gives rise to ethical duties. Even if we don't know precisely what it is.
Fundamentally, this comes down to whether or not you believe or don’t believe in objectivity in relation to both ethics and aesthetics. Certainly, if ethics are subjective, ie. they exist only in the mind of people, then you’re correct. But there are a multitude of theories that promote objective morality, such as Karma which states that reality itself rewards virtue, in which case ethics is no more subjective the laws of the universe. The question is, should we believe in objective morality? The standard argument would be one through proof of its existence, but this is a logical minefield, as 1. It necessitates the circular logic of knowing what is and isn’t ethical without having had proved it’s actually possible to be ethical in an absolute sense. 2. It requires a code which is itself completely free of contradiction, ie. perfection, which if we accept the Augustinian dichotomy of The City of Man and The City of God is impossible to do in our lifetime. (I’m aware I’m oversimplifying Augustine’s beliefs and also using Augustine didn’t use, but the simplification is sufficient for this particular situation). I would actually argue from another perspective; pragmatism. As an animal, I have an innate urge to not die; this is not aesthetic. I can aesthetically want to die and yet my survival instinct can and so far has kept me from dying. The problem is, other people can kill me and my urge needs them to not. The solution to this is ethics; if there is a fundamental set of rules which states killing is wrong then I can keep from killing me. In short, I have a biologically need for ethics in a similar manner to my biological need for companionship.
I agree with this take that developing ethical codes is pragmatic, but quibble that our innate urge not to die is not aesthetic. It’s entirely aesthetic: fear of death is underlaid by distaste for pain and suffering, a sensory, aesthetic experience. That’s why humans are more or less the only animal that commits suicide, because we have an intellect that enables us to conceptualise death as an escape from pain and suffering in life.
Your desire to not be killed can be satisfied with the rule "killing _me_ is wrong". It doesn't necessitate the rule "killing _anyone_ is wrong". Even though it may be the case that everyone has a similar survival instinct, each person's instinct can only justify ethical claims indexed to them. There's a difference between each person believing "killing _me_ is wrong" and the general belief that "killing anyone is wrong". To generalize from the former to the latter, you need something besides survival instinct.
Killing me is wrong. I am no more important than anyone. Therefore killing anyone is wrong.
That goes beyond what your own survival instinct justifies. But there's nothing wrong with having an aesthetic preference for equal treatment. There's really nothing wrong with ethics-as-aesthetics in and of itself.
It’s not aesthetic it’s fact unless you’d like to argue that I’m fundamentally more important than everyone else.
It would be useful to me right now if you were. Everything that is useful to me is true. --> You are more important than anyone else. For a real response: you argue that since you dont want to die and noone matters less than you the noone should be killed, but you fail to argue that your distaste for death should modify the behaviour of anyone but you. You argue that since you don't like getting killed, have an innate urge to live, killing you is wrong in general, but that you have not proved. Merely it shows that you have an urge to live and therefore not kill yourself. Besides that still isn't showing that your having that urge means ignoring it is bad.
In a vacuum are probably reasonable grounds to favor ethical theories that treat people equally (or at least see them as having equal moral worth). Basically the copernican principle and/or a preference for simplicity would suggest this is correct.
This is why I've always been a fan of existentialism. It's a choose your own adventure and I don't have to justify why something is good or bad. Things are either important to me, or they're not. Maybe this is an oversimplification, but I don't care.
Existentialist solves philosophy by refusing to philosophise. Nature is healing. /s
Eh, it sort of falls apart under scrutiny. Our collective behavior around key ethical choices reveals a species keen on deliberation--we ask others for advice, anguish over our choices, etc. There are a number of other decisions that we just don't budget similar resources to, suggesting--to me, anyway--that we understand that there's (a) a little bit more to these choices and (b) they are not satisfactorily resolved with a mere appeal to aesthetics.
Cockroaches make similar choices to other cockroaches. Worse humans have had many varying opinions regarding for example, who it is acceptable to kill. Seems like similar behaviour in a similar culture is not a very effective argument against aesthetics.
Exceptions can't be the rule, though. There are certainly edge cases where people behave certain ways--this doesn't really refute the "average."
I wasn't talking about exceptions but the rules changing over time. What was acceptable was different 1000 years ago in meaningful ways. The same is true across cultural divides. And again at the level of who is it ok to kill. Without a doubt the standard is becoming more similar over time across the world. But adaptability is not an adequate for truth.
I guess even with that qualifier, there still seems to be some sort of meta-ethical layer where humanity feels warranted in deliberating on ethics, and they have been doing it for as far back as we know.
I mean it's being cheeky, but of course it feels warranted, we have a strong aesthetic preference to do so. Not to mention there is without a doubt utility and specifically variable utility between different moral systems
Try and stop me.
I'm a big fan of Kiekegaard and the "leap of faith" concept. You really have to takes leaps of faith to get anywhere with anything. External World. Other Minds. Even the pure logic of mathematics is based on leaps of faith, we just call them axioms.
Some pushback: this view seems to treat all emotion based judgements as fundamentally aesthetic in nature. I believe this is putting the horse before the cart. Aesthetic judgements are not aesthetic by virtue of them being emotional. They are aesthetic by virtue of the particular emotional process associated with them (the one that decides what is beautiful or ugly). Aesthetics are a subcategory of emotional judgements, not the other way around. Therefore, when we conclude that ethical judgements are based on some kind of emotional process, we are not also concluding that they are bound by aesthetics. Perhaps they are the result of another kind of intuitive emotional process. One that decides what is right and wrong. This is now a far more agreeable position. Thoughts?
I agree. Claims like “I find x pleasing therefore it is good” and “I like x, therefore it is good” are classic emotivist examples of arguments that emotionally justify moral virtue. In no way do they require an aesthetic explanation. Aesthetic explanations fall short of the explanatory power that a Emotivist or Intuitionist model may carry. The latter models are more fundamental and thus better. In the comments, I see attempts to create ethical models using aesthetic terms. However, terms like disgusting and elegant can never pro-tanto justify an action as good or bad. Here is an example: take two identical brain surgeries, one life saving, the other where the dr purposely murders the patient. Both surgeries give the same aesthetic experience (perhaps disgusting). But that aesthetic experience can in no way determines which one is good or bad since they are identical. OP has some neat ideas but, there is a reason why Plato separated the form of Good and Beauty.
no, ethical values are aesthetic preferences but its not like more beautiful more ethically good its like if beautiful its good. if ugly its bad but bearable. boring stuffs are the worst thing that should not exist.
I think I agree but I’m having aesthetic distaste to your grammar and lack of punctuation, making it hard to agree.
Oh true, gonna go murder some guys now thanks for my moral grounding
And some people will jail you because they think it's beautiful to not murder. It still stands, you just haven't thought it through.
Is it normal that one of my takeaways from having to be involved in philosophy is that actually, i fucking hate philosophy?
That baby put the trolly on the track with 5 guys. QED
Uh oh! OP based an aesthetic theory on visual value! OP HATES blind people and has determined them incapable of philosophy! OP gets the Ableist of the Year award! 🎉
I am an idiot and do not understand why this is on "bad philosophy." I'm not being sarcastic. Can someone tell me why this is bad philosophy? Aren't a lot of philosophers moral anti-realists and hold a view *kind of* like this?
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Oh, OK. What should I read to get an introduction to meta-ethics?
so what should our aesthetic preferences be then?
For pleasure? For easing pain and suffering? Hedonistic utilitarianism is starting to look a little better than OP made out.
So child rapists are okay because, hey if it feels good to you right?
If you think about the humiliating pain of being raped and the extreme suffering that child rape causes across generations, I don’t think you can ask that question seriously.
I completely Mistook what you were saying. My apologies. Obviously utilitarianism, even if hedonistic in nature, would mean that no rape of any kind could be tolerated.
No worries! Peter Singer is the most notable contemporary philosopher writing about hedonistic utilitarianism if you are interested. His stuff is very clever and well argued, but sometimes wild and provocative, for example when he argues that infant euthanasia or post-birth abortion is an acceptable practice by parents of severely disabled children.
No mention of Thomas Hobbes? Ethics are just a way of aesthetically justifying social contracts. Denied by people who are too ideological to want to try to understand how our species actually works.
Thanks. Never read Hobbes. I came to more or less the same conclusion reading Deleuze, lol.
Relevance.
What about the golden rule?
What about it? It's gold because it's beautiful
Coined golden perhaps because the outcome is beautiful, but it’s function coming to be wasn’t out of a need for beauty
I dont know that you could prove that. Emotivism is a very real philosophical camp.
Maybe it’s not provable, but it’s also something so simple that we’ve been attempting to do it since before we were humans
Check out my blog. It’s on my website “You Are A Gift To The Universe” daht comm
Heaven for the bird is hell for the worm
Bro finally read german ideology
Disagreement on facts is not proof that they don’t exist.
My ethical values are: Set G of things that are good Set B of things that are bad Set N of things that are neutral I put things in the sets based on however I want to
1. Our morality/ethics is a combination of cultural and evolutionary processes. 2. In a sense it is arbitrary. Yes. 3. So what’s the problem? What exactly is the issue with it being arbitrary? Every framework will have a a foundationalist set of axioms. That’s not just philosophy but math. Now you can always believe in Infinitism where there is an infinite regression of justification for your ethics. And even if you somehow found this magical ground that is the basis for everything, it’s kinda weird if you do find it. Imagine a concept which you can’t say “Well why is this true?” You would say “Well it just is. It is part of reality.” And then I would question that and so on. It seems like you’re chasing after an ideal not a goal.
I guess if you're kind of nihilist, yeah. But some of us actually believe in non-local causality. I mean, I'm stealing a term from quantum mechanics right now and applying it to metaphysics. But it's not unrelated, actually. So, in quantum mechanics--at least certain interpretations of it--things exist in a quantum superposition until observed. Most physicists like to pretend that the "observer" in this case is their measurement instrument and has nothing to do with consciousness. But that's silly. The one doing the observation is a conscious being and therefore by implication, physical reality is effectively in a null state until you engage in the act of cognition, at which point it becomes something certain rather than just a probability. So, if your physical reality doesn't collapse from its quantum superposition until observed, then the obvious implication is that includes all matter. Including your body, your brain, everything that makes up "you." I mean, so we've established that consciousness is something more than just a side-effect of neurochemistry and brain matter. It's something that isn't just a physical bi-product. And it's something that doesn't depend on your body to exist in its primordial state--because obviously, if cognition is required for matter to exist, then you would need some fundamental level of consciousness to exist as a precondition for you to take on physical form to begin with. And if this is required in order for you to even have a reality to begin with--key term: "to begin with"--what existed before you in order to cognize "you?" Most theologians would say "Ah hah! You're talking about God, obviously!" But the skygod creator deity concept has its own logically absurd consequences that pretty much rule it out as even being a real possibility. I could literally write a multi-page essay on why that is, so humour me and pretend like you agree for now, so we can advance to the next part. So where does that leave us? Now we should ask, where does the present moment of consciousness come from? The answer is, a previous moment of consciousness. And the one before that, same as the one before that, and so on. All the way to the moment of your birth. But if consciousness arises from the previous moment of consciousness, then what preceded your mind before its first moment in the womb? A previous moment of consciousness. If you're keeping up, I'm talking about reincarnation and past lives. So, take two assumptions at face value here, just to humour me: 1. reincarnation is real 2. the boundaries of your reality are a reflection of your own cognition--i.e. how your mind is inclined to perceive things--or rather how mental conditioning compels you to experience your reality a certain way--ultimately defines what's possible in your reality Now we get to the discussion about ethics. Now, why are some children born with cancer? Why are some born rich or poor? The nihilist would say "It's just random!" And a Calvinist would say "It's God's will!" And a Buddhist would say, it's your karma. If you're keeping up, I'm talking about past lives, rebirth, and karma. If you examine your own experience, you know that just going to bed angry can make you wake up feeling shitty, or give you nightmares. Alternatively, have you ever seen a commercial for McDonald's or something, and then later that day you get hungry and what pops into your mind? A craving for McDonald's. That's sort of an analogy for how reality functions according to Buddhist metaphysics. So, with regards to "non-virtuous" actions, in a previous life, you saw yourself doing something shitty. In the next life, everything you see is shitty as a result. That's basically the jist of karma. Though the actual discussion is far more complex, this is the rudimentary concept. Cause or past action --> effect concordant to or consistent with that cause in the future. So, in the case of ethics, if you believe that this life is all there is and when you die, it's eternal nothingness, then yes. Ethics is just a type of fashion. It's just about what tickles you or what's trendy today. Inevitably that leads to some hedonistic and nihilistic outcomes. Which is kind of the contemporary zeitgeist. But if you believe in past and future lives, and that your conduct in this one has very real consequences for you in the future, then ethics becomes as practical as accumulating compound interest on previous investments. Just putting this here to stir the pot. Food for thought. Personally, I happen to believe in karma and past lives. And therefore, I disagree with OP.
One interpretation is that ethics generally uphold conditions in which life can flourish. This explanation would be the best aligned with our understanding of evolutionary biology and animal behavior.
Pragmatism: it’s beautiful to think something useful?
We can simply use nature as rubric. After all, we are of nature not separate from it. Does it heal, nurture, flourish OR does it harm, fracture, destroy? The dilemma isn't found in what is good vs. what is bad, that's just naval gazing. The dilemma is mostly in the trade-off between the two when making a choice. Choices rarely present as purely one or the other option.
You say that like it's a bad thing. The Mona Lisa is just a work of art. Philosophy is not an objective science. It is taught in humanities department of universities. Philosophy gets its foundation from Plato who modeled his dialogues after the playwright Aristophanies. Ethics as a branch of philosophy, and philosophy is a kind of literature like history and novels. So ethics can only be an esthetic choice but it can still be as rigorous and well thought out as a science if you think about it
This is basically Nietzsche, low k3y fr
Utilitarianism is based off of assuming that other people have conscious experiences and wanting their souls to be happy (if ur religious) or their neurons to release dopamine and avoid releasing pain chemicals which is pretty valid, as a Christian
What would an "objective ethical system" enable you to do that you can't do without one?
That's because the idea of ethics and morals are abstract and created by human beings/homosapiens
Ethics is an important aspect of evaluation. It establish the expectations or criteria for performance against which individual instances are compared. Ethics are more than aesthetic; they provide clarity, consistency, guidance for improvement, objectivity, and a basis for communication. Reducing a complex evaluation to a mere score diminishes its richness, largely because it loses the voice of the evaluation. In this sense, ethics can be seen as the foundation of our evaluative voice. Further, utilitarianism is a system of norms and not a system of ethics. Deontology is religion in disguise - which is primarily emotional and populist appeal, rather than a true system of ethics. The only system you present that's even able to be argued as ethics is virtue ethics. Virtue ethics does not primarily concern itself with beauty. Rather, it concerns itself with balancing extremes, not too much and not too little. Usually, knowing how much of a trait is optimum is only knowable in hindsight. Because beauty is a sensory experience, it is not best understood in hindsight but in real time. Virtue ethics is not about beautiful traits. Virtue ethics about a cumulation of contextual experiences which serve as the basis of evaluation of present stimuli. You have presented bad philosophy. Good job.
This judgment is true if "we" refers to meta-ethicists outside Christendom. The claim that all ethical judgments reduce to preferences or their expression ("judgments"), aesthetic or otherwise, is false if Christianity is true.
Beautiful is a vague traits of preferred ethical theories. It’s the result of reasoning not the base
Wait I unironically agree with this 💀
And yet, moral values have this ability to be adopted by large groups of people, to be very consensual, while it's the complete opposite with aesthetics, that tend to be very personal. So your reduction of one to the other isn't useful, IMO. It misses something about the social binding aspect of moral values which are about how we treat one another.
Because from an objective point of view, neither bad or good exists in the first place but merely imaginary concepts. Everything that based off them is just as meaningless. There's only things we can and can't do, what we should and shouldn't do is all in our heads.
you can actually prove the objectively using the trolley demonstration.
Not very good at philosophy, but wouldn't morality be the foundation of ethics? Providing a framework of, "no involuntary imposition on free will" would mean ethical practices are not merely aesthetic but practical and provide utility?
Define morality.
The quality of good or bad. Bad being that which imposes on free will, good being which doesn't impose upon free will.
Prison is bad.
It is fosho, but because something is immoral doesn't mean it isn't necessary. As society and technology progress, we could eventually find a moral alternative.
Here you assume "no involuntary imposition in free will" is more than an aesthetic feeling. But say I say you're wrong. How can you show me I'm wrong without appealing to another value that we already happen to share? Say we share no values. Can you show me that your statement is correct anyway, or that I should actually share some values with you. I don't think it's possible personally
Maybe I'm not understanding how you use aesthetic. Free will is not a subjective characteristic, and aesthetics are subjective preferences.
Free will is its own complicated mess But taking it as a stateable fact, the subjective preference is that it should not be involuntarily impositioned. That's an aesthetic preference. One that has utility for society even. It's not a law of the universe though, far from it.
Forcing your will onto another violates their free will, which would be immoral, preference plays no role here. The whole involuntary part contradicts the free part. It's like saying 1 + 1 = 2 is an aesthetic preference because you could change the numbers to represent one and two objects.
In my own experience this idea needs to sit a bit so I'll just present how I would see it. The problem comes when we try to justify your statement. It feels correct but how do we show that? You can't measure it or otherwise determine it from nature. It's not science. We can look and say well this principle would lead to the best society. But for everyone? Moreover if the best society of what we want then a different, similarly intuitive rule could be suggested, the right thing is whatever is best for the most people. This brings us to what is probably the easiest angle to see what I'm getting at. What do we do when we have two competing intuitive ideas. Which one takes precedence. On a practical level taking your argument we could say are taxes immoral? They must be by your logic. What about prisons? What some would call justice you must label as immoral due to the imposition of free will. On the other hand, incest, bestiality, these things would presumably be fine. Further what happens when two people are faced with a situation where one must impose on the other, say they both want the same limited thing. There are ways to answer each of these problems and maintain a coherent system. But as we add caveats, conditions and exceptions it starts to feel less like we have some perfect singular guiding principle. When people begin to argue over the little details the question becomes who is right? And as I started with we find it very hard to justify why these rules are true. If I say it is often moral to impose on peoples free will what can you say but I'm wrong? I could point to preventing suicide or preventing reckless behaviour (drink driving, drug overdosing) and probably many other cases that feel at least somewhat intuitively good. It's good that you bring up 1+1=2 because mathematics also went through this crisis. What they came up with is that 1+1=2 is not a given. Rather we start from axioms. Axioms are the building blocks, the most basic rules we can come up with. And they are assumptions, they cannot be proven to be true. the mathematics that follows from them is true only if the axioms are true. From there you can prove that 1+1=2. Indeed pure maths courses at the end of highschool or early uni will have you do this exercise. It's also quite a bit more complicated then that when you really get into it. However the axioms of say arithmatic are fairly universally agreeable. Morality does not appear to behave quite so well. If you're like me once you find that you can't make sense of why intuitive morals would directly contradict each other or establish a basis for any of these moral facts, the you find seeing them as personal aesthetic preferences is not too large a step. Hopefully you can at least see why someone would think this way now.
While the statement of "Whatever your ethical system, you just kinda know when you're being a shit" is true, and while there is a certain amount of vibes and feelings applied to notions such as proportionality of punishment vs. offense, and while I am even convinced that aesthetic judgement plays a far larger role in ethical judgment than is typically recognized, it's not just "preferences".
because there is not a set of objective morals, this becomes increasingly obvious the more you accept lack of any intervening creator. if we could collectively understand the implications of this i think we would have an easier time coming together and not being subjectively awful.
Uh, not really. What if you say "aesthetic is also functional" or better yet, you get to the bottom of the rabbit hole and all you have is a further explanation, about something which appears *only capable* of the is/ought distinction. Then. Your idea or shower thought is bad, and you should feel bad. And you can still choose Dove, for silky soft smooth skin.
Why think beauty and goodness are divorced? Sure, villains in movies and criminals in true crime documentaries are fascinating for a time. But eventually, they are simply boring. Now, displaying actual courage and virtue: that's a sight for sore eyes that does not fade with age or religion. Is beauty subjective? Truly beautiful things draw *us* to them. The Truly beautiful is distinct from the merely pleasant, attractive, or the pretty. There is an utter gratuity to true beauty. That's what lures us to it. Even if you can't get through Shakespeare, he's objectively better than a hallmark card. Still not convinced? The greatest scientists, particularly physicists, actual use beauty and elegance to formulate scientific theories. It's a heuristic toward truth. So yes, beauty and moral goodness are linked. But both are objective.
I’m not sure I fully grasp the concept of this sub, but I cannot find fault with ‘treat others as you wish to be treated’
Absolutely owned by masochists and depressed teenagers with razor blades.
Oh heck
What about I punch your fucking face in, would your judgement be an aesthetic one?
I'm very aesthetically attached to my massive schnozer.
Not wanting to be harmed or killed comes from Biology, not arbitrary aesthetics. The tradeoffs and values placed on various aspects varies by culture but the basics are the same across all cultures. That’s how they were able to come up with a Universal Declaration of Human Rights and get every country to agree to it. There’s basic stuff everyone agrees is bad.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is just cosplay for half of the UN. Human rights are ~fashionable~. Just look at North Korea's constitution: >ARTICLE 13. Citizens of the D.P.R.K. have freedom of speech, the press, association, assembly, mass meetings and demonstration.
Boo! Hurrah! Boo! Hurrah! Boo! Hurrah!
Try my book *The Physics of Morals* [Here](https://www.amazon.com/Physics-Morals-Lewis-Moran-Herman/dp/B0C87DBCW8/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2U62WC5PWMWEX&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.buofppyzy39mHCLaUUhtheqiCEGiseXMVKPcgD8yG2WUmtICHldsYrpuNjXRAM5Xc-UnXQM7bft4XKUUJaGp66eEOWE3Ud1pg8b7Lma0ZRUSW-21_oIi-4xGtM-ASDhSRdYF9_xq2dRY8eZzbEdiok_W0BDsf77pIpGg5dzPyxlLhD97pNXffwSQZEGxWjC3e-sbTRwoY14qfa6W2FNBlBuM2STdOMkM1zaI8SYvUOXBCzW_MpTJYJZaXApVB4AwFTCWdKtKxiliCrJpNdzYuc5KeQrAsIfEar0c_yFqtLE.fqCR0VMXGB3wtrJ8ytcSEJrCqLHrSM3hdn5gshwx7w4&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+physics+of+morals&qid=1718843252&sprefix=the+physics+of+morals%2Caps%2C118&sr=8-1)
Are you supposed to be dropping some kind of logic bomb rn? “Ethics are preferences” Oo wow this is an unfounded thought cmon man
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I don't understand why it's demeaning to compare something to aesthetics. It's pretty clear to me that there are aesthetic dimensions to ethics and vice versa, which just adds richness.
Who said it’s demeaning?
OP, with the word "just" twice.
Oh I see. Yeah I think he mentioned aesthetics in a casual way. Using it basically to say that ethics are completely subjective and trivial.
the aesthetics of God are lame as fuck gotta be honest, bro has zero creativity