Aesthetic Value as a Tertiary Quality ? 1

Those who would defend the possibility of objective normative properties owe us plausible examples of what such a property might be, how our normative discourse and practices might reflect or be shaped by it, and how we might be able to speak of it and know it. Discussions of normativity have tended to focus on deontic or directive (ought/ought not) judgments rather than evaluative (good/bad) judgments. Many have claimed that evaluative judgments can simply be defined in terms of deontic concepts plus some naturalistic attitude, as in: ‘x is good = x ought to be desired for its own sake’. But others doubt this, myself included, and do not find credible the definitional priority of the deontic. And within normative ethics, increasingly many suspect that deontic categories have been too central in modern ethics, and properly occupy a more limited station in morality.2 Historically, a number philosophers have looked to aesthetic value in order to explain in what sense normative judgment might be objective, among them Hume (“Of the Standard of Taste”), Kant (Critique of Judgment), and Wittgenstein (“Lecture on Aesthetics”). In this paper I explore this idea within a broadly naturalistic setting, gleaning some cues from these philosophers along the way from these philosophers concerning how a theory of objective value might be developed.