I'm interested in the distinction you draw between morals and aesthetics. You think they're different things?
ETA: What I mean is, morals seems like a subset of aesthetics.
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I'm interested in the distinction you draw between morals and aesthetics. You think they're different things?
ETA: What I mean is, morals seems like a subset of aesthetics.
In denotation, I think they are exactly the same in practice. In connotation, they are vastly different things.
Morals are given a privileged air of veracity. Once something is declared to be someone's moral (or ethic), socially it moves from something that we can discuss and debate at the same level of "which do you prefer, fried or baked chicken?" to "what do you mean, you think I over-value human life?"
Which is, of course, quite silly.
Morals are just really loudly stated aesthetics, and anyone who tells you differently is making an appeal to a third person authority whom you didn't take on board. Some of them are useful (as generally finding murder inaesthetic and promoting that as a social norm can be useful in keeping yourself from being murdered), but that is by no means the nature of things inherently.
But just because they are at heart the same thing to reasonable people, that's no reason to lose track of the fact that most of the time you are dealing with unreasonable people – and these unreasonable people believe that morals are qualitatively different from aesthetics, that they can't be challenged, that they shouldn't be challenged, nor should they be argued either for or against – because argument implies that rational thinking can be applied to the question, and in their minds there can be no question.
You'll notice that we have somehow ended up back at the "can/can't" versus "should/shouldn't," and that is not a surprise. "Can/can't" is often complicated when it runs in the reality which only cares about "does/doesn't."
So, no – I don't think that morals and aesthetics are different things, but I would be a fool not to recognize that other people react to them as though they were different things, they behave as though they were different things, and even though I disagree with those decisions and those choices, if I want to communicate with them I have to acknowledge the difference in approach.
Otherwise, how would I mock them properly?