Rían Coady (Lincoln): 'Is Aesthetic Realism as Plausible as Moral Realism?'
Abstract: Aesthetic realism, the view that beauty is mind- and response-independent, has received increased attention in recent years, with some arguing that aesthetic realism is just as plausible as its much more popular realist counterpart in metaethics. In this talk, I give two reasons for thinking that moral realism is more plausible than aesthetic realism. The first is that we have stronger realist and cognitivist intuitions in the moral case than we do in the aesthetic case. The second is that it is more plausible to think that there are moral laws that explain particular moral facts than to think that there are aesthetic laws, and hence that moral realism requires fewer brute moral facts than aesthetic realism requires brute aesthetic facts.
