Moral and Aesthetic Judgements Reconsidered

<p>Traditionally in philosophy, ethics and aesthetics are bracketed together under the heading of ‘‘value judgment.’’ This classification tends to obscure important differences between the domains of ethical and aesthetic judgment as we normally practice them. In this paper I attempt to gauge the differences between the two domains as they are manifested in our ordinary thought, to situate our normal practices of moral and aesthetic judgment in relation to each other, and to compare the two modes of evaluation in order to see where they diverge, overlap, and correspond. Despite philosophers who would view them as radically dissimilar systems of thought and feeling, the two realms should be marked off not by their mutually exclusive subject matters, since they have overlapping subject matters, or in terms of the kinds of properties, which are indicative rather than constitutive of the real difference, but in terms of the specific nature of the two kinds of judgment.</p>