Taste & Beauty
Why do I keep arguing about a song if it's just taste?
The question
Your friend says the song is a masterpiece. You think it's manufactured, focus-grouped, empty. So you make a case — the lyrics are lazy, the hook is borrowed, it's three chords and a haircut. He makes a case back — you're missing the production, the restraint, what it does in the last thirty seconds. And it gets heated, the way these things do, until one of you finally says it: "Look, it's all subjective. There's no right answer. You like what you like."
And you both nod, relieved, like that settles it.
Except — if there's genuinely no right answer, what were the last twenty minutes? You didn't trade feelings. You traded reasons. You tried to show him something about the song, as if it were in the song, as if he'd missed it and could be brought to see it. Nobody argues that hard over whether they prefer salt or vinegar. So either the song thing isn't really like the salt thing — or you've been doing something strange and a little embarrassing for twenty minutes, and so has everyone you've ever argued taste with.
The episodes
Each episode builds on the one before, and the finale hands the question back to you sharper, not settled.
9 of 9 transcripts are readable now — audio is coming.
-
1
The argument you won't drop
An argument about a song ends with "it's all subjective anyway" — but the twenty minutes before that were spent trading reasons, as though the other person were wrong and could be shown. This first episode holds open the gap between what we say about taste and what we do with it, with no theories and no names yet attached.
Read transcript → -
2
Overrated relative to what?
Overrated, underrated, a better critic, an acquired taste — ordinary words that each assume a standard the speaker's stated view says does not exist. The episode takes "overrated" apart and finds that one cannot lodge even a casual complaint about taste without relying on the very thing one claims is not there.
Read transcript → -
3
The true judges
David Hume's essay Of the Standard of Taste (1757) grants that beauty is not a property of objects, then locates the standard in the joint verdict of the true judges — critics of wide experience, fine discrimination and no prejudice. The account is built at full strength, up to the objection it never fully answers — who counts as a true judge, and who decides.
Read transcript → -
4
The universal voice
Immanuel Kant, in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), describes what happens when one person calls a thing beautiful — a demand that everyone agree, made with what he calls a universal voice, and with nothing that could compel the agreement. The episode sets out why he took the unenforceable demand to be not a defect in the judgment but its nature.
Read transcript → -
5
Real the way colour is
Perhaps beauty is real the way colour is real — a genuine property, there to be perceived, but only by the right kind of eye. The episode builds this account, associated with John McDowell and David Wiggins, and presses its cost — saying what makes an ear the right one without circling back to the very verdicts it was meant to ground.
Read transcript → -
6
Recruiting, not reporting
Simon Blackburn's account holds that a judgment of taste was never a report of a fact but a recruitment — an attempt to bring another person into a way of hearing — and that every realist word, from "better" to "overrated", can be earned back with no fact underneath. Whether that vindicates the practice or quietly gives it away is left with the listener.
Read transcript → -
7
Whose eye is it?
Pierre Bourdieu argued that taste is a reliable marker of social class — that the response which feels most spontaneous and most personal is predictable from schooling, upbringing and position. The episode builds his case until it stings, then presses the places where it may claim too much. Neither the reading nor the remainder is withdrawn.
Read transcript → -
8
Where the 'aesthetic' came from
The idea of the aesthetic — a separate kind of value, registered by a disinterested eye that wants nothing from the thing — has a date of origin in the eighteenth century, with Shaftesbury among its makers. The episode watches a category that feels natural acquire a history, and refuses to let the date become either a debunking or a triviality.
Read transcript → -
9
Now do it on morality
The five accounts — Hume's judges, Kant's demand, the colour-like property, Blackburn's recruitment, Bourdieu's class reading — are set side by side with their costs, and no winner is chosen. Then the same questions are turned on morality, where almost no one is a relativist, and the series ends by asking what makes goodness the exception.
Read transcript →
Thinkers
The thinkers and traditions this series draws on: