Ranting to /dev/null

Ethics vs. aesthetics

I'm coming to believe more and more that one of the marks of maturity is the ability to distinguish between one's ethical sensibilities and aesthetic sensibilities. Far too many people conflate the two, and insist that anything they find aesthetically offensive - be it the Bush administration, Wal-Mart, or consumerism - are immoral, rather than just unpleasant.

Beauty, on a personal level, really is in the eye of the beholder. For many people, Wal-Mart is an aesthetic offense. They like little shops and downtown areas, they don't like suburban sprawl and gigantic parking lots. The thing to remember is that whether or not you like something doesn't automatically have anything to do with whether or not the thing in question is moral or not.

The fact that millions of people die from starvation every year does not automatically mean that there it is a moral problem for them to do so. People die. It happens. It's always happened. It will always happen. In fact, it's the rule, not the exception. The past two hundred years are the first time that any significant portion of the human population hasn't been in immediate danger of starvation. We're talking two out of, at minimum, sixty centuries. People die from disease every day. That doesn't mean that there's anything immoral about people dying from disease. It isn't pretty, but it isn't immoral. But again, the fact that we don't like people to die from starvation or disease doesn't somehow mean that there's an immorality involved. I'm not arguing that these things are right, just, and moral, only that the aesthetics of the situation doesn't enter in to any discussion of the morality of the situation.

Conversely, there are plenty of things that are commonly perceived as beautiful that are, in fact, immoral. Various, ahem, "extracurricular" sexual activities would fall in this category. They are attractive, appealing, and desirable, but that doesn't affect the underlying morality of the situtation. There's also a certain aesthetic appeal to the equality and brotherhood of man, but that doesn't make either of them true or right.

It's imperative that people learn to make these distinctions. Too many people are wandering around with the idea that if they don't like something that there must needs be something morally wrong with it. Introducing aesthetics to the discussion of any moral issue is like sticking a magnet next to your moral compass: it gives crazy results.