1 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Is-Ought Problem responses
Actually, couldn't you make the same "behooves" argument of aesthetic preferences?
I mean thinking of works of art as entities which need to "survive" in the environment of the mental consciousness of people in society. It's a similar thing, right? Unfavorable qualities will get filtered out and those works of art "die" by lack of reproduction (being remembered and passed on from mind to mind).
So certain qualities DO support a work of art's efforts to maintain an internal unity. They need to have qualities which allow them to survive their environment, just as we physical creatures do.
Comment by Quidfacis_ at 25/07/2016 at 03:09 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Yeah, this is why I dislike these arguments.
When presented with a naturalistic definition of "good", such as the "something is good for an organism if it supports it in its efforts to maintain its internal unity" presented by /u/autopoetic, anyone with adequate creative faculties can play with that definition to include whatever they like. You did an excellent job. Change 'organism' to 'artwork', 'survive' to 'be liked by audience', etc. That is exactly what you needed to do, and it was done quite well.
The problem with playing with definitions in this way, is that we lose the meaning of both the original question and the original answer. OP wanted some objective criteria by which to justify aesthetic preferences without "value-laden language".
The biological account of good succeeds in this insofar as "alive" and "die" are not value-laden. They are objective binary states we can measure and identify, ignoring all the quibbling folks do over Terri Schiavo cases.
That binary objective non-value-laden language does not occur with "environment of the mental consciousness of people in society". This because "people in society" reintroduces the problem OP wanted to avoid. Consider the third Transformers movie, "Dark of the Moon". According to Rotten Tomatoes[1], 55% of 'audience' folks liked it. For 55% of people who saw it, the film will " 'survive' in the environment of the mental consciousness of people in society".
1: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/transformers_dark_of_the_moon/
So, shit. We're back at the problem OP wanted to solve. How do we resolve that conflict between the 55% and the 45% without using value-laden language of aesthetic preference? We want to justify the claim of whether or not the movie *is good*. If we try to map that onto your proposed bioligyization of artwork, then for Transformers 3, 55% of the audience thinks the film is alive while 45% thinks it is dead.
Rut Roh