ice cream”), aesthetic identifications and evaluations (“Gaddis’ JRis an
important work of twentieth-century art”), and moral judgments (“It is
wrong to set cats on fire for fun”). As Roger Scruton characterizes the
differences between these kinds of judgment, with mere taste a retreat to
“Well, I like it”is always available: no one is blamed for free sensory likings
or aversions, and reversion in conversation about them to“Well, I like it”is
less a retreat from critical reasoning than it is an apt withdrawal from the
impertinent hectoring of another. With at least some moral judgments, no
retreat is possible. We are prepared–at least sometimes–to appeal to
principles and to argue that anyone who disagrees with the moral verdict
in question must be wrong; standing outside certain moral consensuses may
disqualify one from having standing in moral conversations at all. With
aesthetic identifications and evaluations, retreat to“Well, I like it”is avail-
able and relevant, but it is, sometimes, a genuine retreat from further shared
exploration of and conversation about the work.“Well, I like it”can function
eitheras a withdrawal from hectoring, that is, as a reminder to an impertin-
ent other (and to myself) that my experience of the work counts,oras a
genuine retreat, a disengagement, a withholding of oneself from exploring
the work further oneself and with others.^77 Identifications and evaluations of
works of art involve, always, a normative“search for agreement...A man
with a normative attitude toward X feels that others should recognize the
qualities he likes or admires in X, and on this basis come to like
X themselves.”^78 But the force of one’s normative attitude is“a matter of
degree,”^79 and, as Isenberg reminds us, even after considerable critical con-
versation, communion may or may not follow.
Here identifications and evaluations of art resemble our responses to
persons. We can, sometimes and with some success, talk about what we like
or dislike in a person, and so both bring others to a similar response and feel
more confidence that our own liking has a reasonable basis. But not always.
There is a residue of free liking. My response to Jones that differs from yours
may have to do with differences between me and you, not only with the
(^77) See Scruton,Art and Imagination, pp. 137–38. Compare also Cavell,“Aesthetic Problems of
Modern Philosophy,”pp. 88–94. Cavell is explicitly taking up and developing Kant’s
distinctions between judgments of the (merely) agreeable, judgments of the beautiful,
and judgments of the morally good in §§3–8 of theCritique of the Power of Judgment,
pp. 90–101.
(^78) Scruton,Art and Imagination, p. 139. (^79) Ibid.
Identifying and evaluating art 197