Aesthetic Judgment: It's All About How Much

Abstract

Making an aesthetic judgment—trying to decide which works of art are better or more valuable than others—has a long and not particularly distinguished history. The reason I say this is because although art world members (anyone either professional or amateur interested in art either for a short or long term) have freely expressed their opinions about what is good about a particular work of art, nevertheless they have had no sound or empirical justification for those opinions. As things stand today, one who contemplates making an aesthetic judgment faces something of a dilemma. On the one hand, one faces the problem of deriving aesthetic concepts from nonaesthetic concepts; this is a variation of the well-worn is/ought problem. On the other hand, one faces the problem of qualitative hedonism, which according to some critics is intellectually bankrupt. Both of these critiques of aesthetic judgment suggest that aesthetic judgment has reached an impasse, that the hope of establishing a rational foundation for the justification of aesthetic judgment is hopeless. In this article, I will first examine the dilemma, and then I will argue that there is a solution to establishing a rational foundation for aesthetic judgment; that rational foundation is to be found in the closely connected ideas of quantitative hedonism, consequentialism, and the test of time.