A Value Objectivist and a Value Subjectivist at an Art Museum
VO: That’s a beautiful painting.
VS: À chacun son goût.
VO: To each his own taste, you say?
VS: Yes. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
VO: That’s true only with respect to beholders with beautiful eyes.
VS: What do you mean?
VO: I grant that beauty is in the eyes of those people who have beautiful eyes. But I deny that beauty is wholly subjective, as you seem to claim.
VS: That is my claim. What is your position on beauty?
VO: We should distinguish between taste and beauty. The former is a capacity to recognize the latter. In other words, one’s taste is a faculty of aesthetic judgment.
VS: I see.
VO: You say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, by which you mean that beauty is merely a subjective liking or taste for something that is not itself the sort of thing that possesses beauty or any other aesthetic value?
VS: Right.
VO: I say that taste is in the mind of the beholder, and that beauty is a feature which exists independently of the beholder’s mind and is recognized by the beholder via this faculty of judgment.
VS: We disagree on the nature of taste.
VO: So it seems.
VS: And the beauty you mentioned when you called the painting “beautiful” is in the painting?
VO: Yes, that is, in some relevant sense of ‘in.’
VS: The beholder recognizes beauty via the faculty of taste?
VO: That’s my position. Your view seems to collapse the distinction between taste and beauty. My position maintains the distinction.
VS: My view only collapses the distinction if there is such a distinction in the first place. It’s open to me to deny the distinction, and instead claim that there is only taste. Your distinction between taste and beauty is a distinction without a difference.
VO: How, then, would you account for the common intuition that there is both beauty and taste, and that these are different things?
VS: I grant that this point is a problem for my position.
VO: And how would you explain the apparent fact that some capacities for taste are more refined than others? Would you deny that there are aesthetic experts who have better judgment than non-experts? Moreover, how would you explain the apparent fact that some things are more beautiful than others?