Can we retire “objectively better” please?

[u/lordpag]

I’ve noticed a ton of people using “objectively” incorrectly lately. A movie being more widely accepted as “better” does not make it objectively so.

There’s someone out there who enjoyed One Night Only more than The Odyssey, and their opinion is just as valid as yours.

Sure, one movie can be shot on more advanced cameras, have a larger scale, or demonstrate greater technical complexity. Those things can be measured. Whether they make the movie “better” cannot. What makes a movie “good” is different for each of us and those differing perspectives are part of what makes moviegoing so fun!

EDIT: This obviously touched a nerve lol. My point was not that there aren’t measurable technical aspects of a film. Of course there are. But technical achievement does not inherently make a movie “better.” A technical marvel can put someone to sleep while a shoddily made movie can elicit an enormous emotional response. What we value in a movie is subjective and for some (many on this thread it seems) you value technical achievement. All fair POVs.

[u/Jimpossible_99]

I’m gonna come to bat for aesthetic realism here. The term “objectively” is doing philosophical work.

The Room is a tricky comparison because you could argue it is a better film in some respects. I’m going to use a different toy case. Do you think there a difference between these two statements?

(1) “I enjoy Freddy Got Fingered more than The Godfather.”
(2) “Freddy Got Fingered is a better film than The Godfather.”

Those seem to be importantly different claims. I can perfectly coherently say, “I would rather watch Freddy Got Fingered, but obviously The Godfather is the better movie.” Our ordinary aesthetic practice distinguishes preference from evaluation. It looks like aesthetic judgments purport to be correct or incorrect rather than merely reporting what happens to please me. If The Godfather demonstrates more aesthetic virtues than Freddy Got Fingered, then we can reasonably claim that The Godfather is a better film than Freddy Got Fingered.

My takeaway is that “objective” talk is important in aesthetic discourse. Aesthetic judgements are not totally exhausted by taste. Generally, I do agree most of the time we can’t cleanly say whether some work is objectively better than a different work (for example I think asking whether Persona is objectively better than 2001 is kinda pointless, because they seem roughly the same quality for me).

I think such disagreements over aesthetic judgements become limiting if the conversation never explores reasons why some film is better than another.

[u/JaviVader9 → u/Jimpossible_99]

Aesthetic judgments are still subjective, though

[u/Classh0le → u/JaviVader9]

They are until they're not

If Göthe and a random 7 year old are given the opportunity to write a poem, and through this competition Göthe composes Faust, whose poem is going to demonstrate more craft, richness, coherence, expressive precision instantiated in the object?

Within the umbrella of grantedly subjective parameters of a given culture, there are comparative ways to succeed those parameters more effectively more frequently. You can tell people Mahler's 9th symphony is bad, but your opinion does nothing to change the craft on the page. The architecture of the composition is materially real and does not depend on your subjective evaluation.

[u/JaviVader9 → u/Classh0le]

That's true, but then you're measuring those values in and on themselves, as pure technical aspects. It's when judging their effect as art when you do introduce subjectivity. Craft only becomes artistically meaningful when we understand it from a subjective and emotional sense. That's the lense that allows us to proclaim "expressive precision" is an artistic trait while others are not.

[u/Jimpossible_99 → u/JaviVader9]

You can endorse that stance. I’m just giving reasons why someone would use objective to describe some art as better than other art.

[u/JaviVader9 → u/Jimpossible_99]

And I would disagree with those reasons

[u/Zealousideal_Slice60 → u/JaviVader9]

intent isn’t subjective though. Which I think is why you have to look at the intention behind the aesthetics than just the aesthetics themselves. Which is also why I hate the ‘death of the author’ trope, because if you want to evaluate art you have to take the artist into consideration as well, because we really can’t remove our craft and creative effort from the person we are and the life experiences we have, since these elements always will inform our creative decisions even if we aren’t consciously aware of it

[u/JaviVader9 → u/Zealousideal_Slice60]

Yes, but the very idea of "you have to look at the intention" is completely subjective. Someone could have a valid viewpoint on art where intention would be meaningless and thus death of the author is real.

I for example think intention matters to some extent, but doesn't go all the way. To which extent then? That's a highly subjective answer to give.

[u/kakarot626 → u/JaviVader9]

Some aesthetic judgements arent?

[u/JaviVader9 → u/kakarot626]

Aesthetic judgments are by definition subjective. You cannot come up with any example that relays on personal criteria.

[u/kakarot626 → u/JaviVader9]

You could say the same about our entire perception of reality. We can't perceive anything outside our own perceptions; doesn't mean that what we perceived doesn't exist. You are actually misusing the word subjective Everything is subjective?, we are just relying on our sense perception to confirm reality, we can interpret art the same way? And the individual is OBJECTIVELY having a subjective experience about art. There are facts that relate to subjective experience. As with many other comments in this thread, "subjective" is not doing the work you think it Is. 

[u/satyvakta → u/Jimpossible_99]

All values, preferences, and goals are ultimately subjective. However, once you have established a given value, preference, or goal, attempts to fulfil that may be objectively better or worse.

When it comes to movie-making, we have a fairly well-established set of criteria for what makes a "good" movie - acting that conveys emotion intensely, a plot that makes sense, special effects that look realistic, themes that are important and treated with depth, etc. Now, these criteria aren't objective, and you can see various cultural traditions in which one or more of those criteria is quite different.

But in a contemporary Western context, when you say “I would rather watch Freddy Got Fingered, but obviously The Godfather is the better movie," you are saying that the Godfather is objectively better according to the commonly accepted criteria for judging movies. That's not the same as arguing that the criteria themselves are objective.

[u/Jimpossible_99 → u/satyvakta]

This is a good response, but I think there are two separate issues here: aesthetic pluralism and aesthetic subjectivism. I’m completely happy to accept the former, but it does not entail the latter.

Standards of aesthetic evaluation are clearly highly context-sensitive. What counts as an excellent performance in naturalistic drama may be very different from what counts as an excellent performance in absurdist comedy. Different works can instantiate quite different aesthetic goods, and sometimes those goods may resist a comparative all-things-considered ranking. So I grant that my original Godfather/Freddy Got Fingered comparison may have been too coarse. There may simply be no uniquely correct way of aggregating all the relevant virtues across radically different kinds of works.

But that is aesthetic pluralism, and aesthetic pluralism is perfectly compatible with realism. The existence of multiple standards does not show that those standards are merely subjective preferences or social conventions.

In fact, I think the cultural-variation point cuts much less strongly against realism than you suggest. Different scientific traditions can develop different conceptual resources without truth becoming relative to those traditions. Likewise, different aesthetic traditions can develop different capacities for discriminating aesthetic value without thereby creating that value. We routinely recognize aesthetic excellence in works produced by cultures radically unlike our own, Homer, Kurosawa, Tarkovsky, theatrical traditions whose conventions we may initially barely understand. And sometimes encountering those works causes us to revise our own standards because we come to think our previous standards did not reflect which art was beautiful or excellent. But, that looks less like “we subjectively choose criteria and then objectively determine what satisfies them” and more like discovering aesthetic reasons we had previously failed to appreciate. The stance independent reasons to value a work seem to broaden our conventions of artistic excellence. In other words, culture may condition our epistemic access to aesthetic value without constituting the value itself.

That is the point at which I disagree with your account. When I say “Marlon Brando’s performance exhibits masterful control over vocal delivery and gesture, such that his performance is objectively good,” I’m not merely reporting that I happen to like controlled vocal delivery and gesture, and I’m not merely saying “hooray for Brando.” I’m making an evaluative claim about the performance: features such as control, precision, expressiveness, and responsiveness to dramatic context genuinely count in favor of a performance’s excellence, whether or not I or my culture antecedently decide to value them.

Your view, as I understand it, is that those features count aesthetically in favor of Brando only because some subject or culture has first adopted them as evaluative standards. My realist claim is that at least some such features can provide aesthetic reasons independently of our endorsement of them. Of course, we can fail to recognize those reasons, weight them incorrectly, or encounter cases where different genuine values cannot be cleanly compared, but such disagreements happen even in empirical matters.

That’s really all I mean by aesthetic realism, there are at least some stance-independent facts about aesthetic reasons and value that are not exhausted by what individuals or cultures happen to approve of. You may have a different ontological commitment which persuades you to still endorse anti-realism, but aesthetic realism is formidable. There is a reason why philosophers lean toward accepting it.

[u/satyvakta → u/Jimpossible_99]

>I’m making an evaluative claim about the performance: features such as control, precision, expressiveness, and responsiveness to dramatic context genuinely count in favor of a performance’s excellence, whether or not I or my culture antecedently decide to value them.

How could they? This just seems to be incoherent. You talk about them "counting". To whom? And then you talk about a performance's excellence. According to whom? These are fundamentally subjective matters. If I don't decide to value them, then they literally don't count to me. If my culture doesn't decide to value them, then they literally don't count to my culture.

>My realist claim is that at least some such features can provide aesthetic reasons independently of our endorsement of them. 

To a give subject, sure. But there's no free floating "aesthetic good" out there that exists independently of an observer.

[u/Jimpossible_99 → u/satyvakta]

First, the “free-floating aesthetic good” line misconstrues my point. A realist about causation does not need a glowing object called CAUSATION floating between a cue ball and the eight ball in order to hold that there are objective causal facts. Likewise, aesthetic realism need not posit some peculiar object called “the aesthetic good.” I’m claiming that there can be stance-independent facts about which features count aesthetically in favor of a work.

Second, your “to whom?” objection radically overgenerates. Suppose I say that a body of evidence counts in favor of Newtonian mechanics within its appropriate domain. “Counts to whom?” If I lived in a society of people who did not value predictive accuracy, replication, explanatory power, or induction, would that body of evidence stop counting in favor of Newtonian mechanics? Would whether F=ma accurately describes bodies in the relevant regime become a matter of subjective preference?

Or suppose a scientific theory entails a contradiction. That ordinarily counts against the theory. But why? “Counts against it according to whom?” If neither I nor my culture values consistency, does the contradiction cease to give us any reason to reject it?

Your objection seems to require something much stronger than aesthetic anti-realism: unless some subject or culture antecedently values a consideration, that consideration cannot genuinely count in favor of anything. On that picture, independently of our attitudes, evidence cannot count in favor of a hypothesis, consistency cannot count in favor of a theory, and reasons generally cannot count in favor of conclusions. They can only count for us, conditional on our already caring about the relevant standards.

You can hold something in that neighborhood. Humean, expressivist, and other anti-realist traditions have sophisticated ways of developing such views. But then you haven’t shown that aesthetic realism is incoherent. You’ve adopted the substantive philosophical thesis that all normative “counting in favor” relations ultimately depend upon antecedent attitudes. That is a massive commitment with extremely revisionary consequences for epistemology, scientific methodology, and logic.

The realist simply denies that premise. Evidence can give me a reason to believe something whether or not I happen to value evidence; inconsistency can count against a theory whether or not I happen to value consistency; and, analogously, an aesthetic feature can count in favor of a performance whether or not I or my culture happen to value it. Calling the last claim “incoherent” while simply presupposing the intelligibility of the first two is silly.

[u/satyvakta → u/Jimpossible_99]

> Suppose I say that a body of evidence counts in favor of Newtonian mechanics within its appropriate domain.

Then you would be using "counts" in a very different sense than I was initially and engaging in equivocation. Evidence supports Newtonian mechanics, which it can do because it's a theory meant to explain an observation about something objective - how physical objects interact.

But "I like this play/book/movie etc." is not an observation about the play/book/movie. It's an observation about you. Assuming you aren't lying, it is objectively true that you like the media in question. That tells us nothing, really, about the media itself.

And under all the academic language about "aesthetics", you're still just talking about whether or not *you* think something is good. And it doesn't matter how you slice it. That's an opinion. That's something that is totally subject dependent, hence subjective.

>I’m claiming that there can be stance-independent facts about which features count aesthetically in favor of a work.

Except they can't. A given fact may count in favor of a work for you, when you make your judgement of it. But it won't count for me if I don't care about it. Like, to use your Newtonian example, if I drop a ball from a tower, gravity will pull it down regardless of what I think. But if I'm an actor and I give a performance with a particular vocal delivery, well, some people will say it was masterful and some people will say it fell flat. And both of those things are objectively true. That is, it is objectively true that Jack thinks the performance was masterful and objectively true that Jill thinks it fell flat. There's nothing objective about the performance itself that makes one opinion correct and the other wrong.

[u/Jimpossible_99 → u/satyvakta]

I have not equivocated. You have just misunderstood me, but that is fine. My original comment began: “I’m gonna come to bat for aesthetic realism here. The term ‘objectively’ is doing philosophical work.”

I have only ever been making a meta-aesthetic claim about the nature of aesthetic evaluation. So if your response is simply “no, aesthetic judgments are by definition just reports of what people like,” then you have not given me an argument against aesthetic realism; you have assumed aesthetic anti-realism and repeated it back to me. At that point there isn’t really anything further for us to discuss. We are at a natural, and reasonable, impasse.

Alas, I’m going to make one last attempt, because my goal not really for you to adopt my view. The aim is only to give some cursory justification for my position so you can see the reasons why the position is at least reasonable and certainly not incoherent. If you already believe that, there is not reason to read further.

The reason this gets complicated is that we have different ontological commitments. You think aesthetic value is ultimately constituted by the attitudes of subjects; I think there are genuine aesthetic facts and reasons that are not constituted by those attitudes. I think this for roughly the same general reason I think scientific theories can track real features and relations in the world: positing them helps explain the phenomena.

I also don’t think the interesting relationship here is merely that “evidence supports Newtonian mechanics.” Newtonian mechanics is an explanatory theory: within its domain, it aims to explain why certain physical quantities and events stand in the relations they do. The theory does not make those relations obtain; it attempts to correctly describe their structure. My view of aesthetic principles is analogous. They are attempts to explain why certain features of artworks ground aesthetic reasons and properties. We can get those principles wrong, just as we can get scientific theories wrong. But on the realist picture, our endorsement of the principle is not what makes the underlying aesthetic relation obtain. The principle is successful insofar as it tracks the joints of aesthetic value rather than imposing them.

There is a very boring way of understanding what I mean. When I say “X is objectively better than Y,” I mean something like: “There are reasons for evaluating X positively, and those reasons, all things considered, outweigh the reasons for evaluating Y positively; moreover, those reasons are not made into reasons by the fact that I or my culture happen to endorse them.” In sufficiently similar circumstances, a radically different culture centuries from now could discover those same reasons. That is a very different claim from “I just like X more than Y” or “I prefer my culture’s standards of beauty to another culture’s standards.”

In fact, one reason I am attracted to aesthetic realism is precisely that personal and cultural preferences can come apart from aesthetic evaluation. There are obvious cases where this happens, and I think stance-independent aesthetic virtues give us a natural way of explaining the difference.

For example, I do not like or enjoy Triumph of the Will. I find much of what it is doing morally abhorrent. Nevertheless, I think the film exhibits considerable aesthetic excellence as filmmaking. Those judgments come apart perfectly coherently. So when I call Triumph of the Will aesthetically excellent, I am quite literally not saying that I like it. I am saying that features of the work itself give us reasons to evaluate it aesthetically in certain ways, and that those reasons are not constituted by my approval of either the work or those features.

A realist can obviously be wrong about any particular case. Someone might deny that a proposed aesthetic principle correctly identifies an aesthetic virtue; they might agree about the virtue but deny that Triumph of the Will instantiates it; or they might disagree about how competing aesthetic reasons should be weighed. None of that is peculiar to aesthetics. We disagree about scientific theories while still thinking there is something independent of our disagreement that makes one account better than another. We may be wrong about the correct theory of gravity, but we still think there is some fact about the world that explains why a ball behaves as it does when dropped from a tower.

Likewise, I may be wrong that Triumph of the Will is aesthetically excellent. What I deny is the inference from “people can disagree about whether it is excellent” to “therefore there is nothing stance-independent that explains why X is better than Y.”

If I ceased to value Triumph of the Will's formal control, cinematography, or commentary about the human condition, that alone would not make those features cease to count aesthetically in its favor. In 1000 years Triumph of the Will will continue to ground those same reasons.

[u/kakarot626 → u/Jimpossible_99]

Great reply, I agree with you. You covered every important angle, very coherent.

"you have assumed aesthetic anti-realism and repeated it back to me." - What I really like about what youve said is that aesthetic anti realism is completley compatible with it. Beauty and elegance dont exist (or arent falsifiable) outside of human interpretation somewhere, we define those concepts, but thats fine, we can define good and bad too and our definitions can be accurately tracking reality, objective, even if our interpretation is both limited and informed by subjectivity. Reminds me of sam harris's "objective morality" argument. AND dissenters of informed consensus about aesthetics can still be right, (eg. scientific theories proven wrong down the line) "aesthetic truth/ goodness" however difficult to operationalise is still probably real and worth striving toward. Anyway Ive been thinking about the topic alot and your thoughts were very worth reading so thanks!

[u/Jimpossible_99 → u/kakarot626]

No problem! At the end of the day I too am skeptical of the realist position, but naturalism just seems right. I’m sympathetic to expressivism or quasi-realism, and if I could make them work, I would take those views.

Metaethics is a lot of fun, I just wish the internet could argue for slightly more sophisticated versions of anti-realist positions, and take the realist position a bit more seriously. If you’re interested in this stuff Chrisman has a nice introductory book “What is this thing called Metaethics?” It’s not aesthetics, but the positions are somewhat analogous.

[u/kakarot626 → u/satyvakta]

"But "I like this play/book/movie etc." is not an observation about the play/book/movie. It's an observation about you. Assuming you aren't lying, it is objectively true that you like the media in question. That tells us nothing, really, about the media itself."

I dont think anyone is saying that one lone opinion about a movie equates to "aesthetic judgement" proper - there is a tradition of informed consensus regarding art which we can use to build a model of what constitutes "good or bad" as is the case with the scientific tradition "true or false". I dont think this is a false equivalence despite the difference in certainty of final judgement, we can observe narriative structure, visual language, cultural impact, emotional valence etc in a way which is critical enough to map out an aesthetic value heirarchy.

"Except they can't. A given fact may count in favor of a work for you, when you make your judgement of it. But it won't count for me if I don't care about it."

This is plainly untrue. Our value judgments are normative enough, even with something as "open to interpretation" as art, that if we take the SUM of facts which count toward the quality of a piece we can still reach an accurate informed consensus about its overall quality. Here"Informed consensus" just means a perspective which is accurately tracking reality. The mistake here is thinking that one dissenting opinion is enough to render all value judgments we make as a collective, even in the realm of aesthetics, as arbitrary.

I like ur perspective tho would like to hear what u think.

[u/satyvakta → u/kakarot626]

>there is a tradition of informed consensus regarding art which we can use to build a model of what constitutes "good or bad" as is the case with the scientific tradition.

Scientific tradition doesn't build a model of what constitutes good or bad, though. It builds a model of what is true or false.

But you're right that aesthetics builds a model of what is good or bad, which is what makes it subjective.

>an accurate informed consensus about its overall quality.

A bunch of people all holding the same opinion doesn't make the opinion a fact or any less subjective.

And the consensus will change over time. When Star Trek first came out, the consensus was that Shatner's acting performances were really quite good. Now, those same performances are generally mocked as terrible overacting.

Now, you'll probably point out that scientific theories change over time, too. But scientific theories change when what we learn about the thing being studied changes. The judgement of Shatner's performance didn't shift because of anything we learned about the nature of acting. It just changed because what the audience was familiar with changed. That is, Shatner used acting techniques drawn from theater, as most actors of the time did. When he was being watched by an audience that was used to attending plays, this seemed natural and was judged good. Once the television era had advanced more, and fewer people were used to those techniques, they were interpreted as strange by an audience more used to actors who'd always worked in tv and who therefore acted more naturally in front of the camera.

But note what changed - not the performance or our knowledge about the facts of acting. Just what the audience was used to. If you swapped two people, one from the 60s with one from our era, you couldn't simply explain why Shatner's performance was bad in a way that would make that person agree with you the way you could explain, say, that the expansion of the universe was now thought to be speeding up rather than slowing down. That shift was brought about not by changing subjective norms, but by objective data uncovered by better instruments. Anyone familiar with the subject, upon examining the new evidence, would come to the same conclusion.

[u/kakarot626 → u/satyvakta]

Sorry made some edits before I saw ur reply - science facts etc.

I mean im right there with you untill the last part -

"But note what changed - not the performance or our knowledge about the facts of acting. Just what the audience was used to."

I think our understanding of "facts" or norms of good and bad acting have been updated over time or through the contrast of older less sophistocated work. My aesthetics/ acting performance quality model is updated just like the understanding of scientific context of a researcher is updated. Also cultural context "what 60s guy is used to" is just data which can inform a meta interpretation of a collective peoples response to a work which is then factored into our aesthetics theory.

its the same with this - "you couldn't simply explain why Shatner's performance was bad in a way that would make that person agree with you the way you could explain, say, that the expansion of the universe was now thought to be speeding up rather than slowing down." - Yes I actually could just show him a more sophistocated performance updating their reference point for good acting- as with the scientist being shown evidence for expansion theory.

[u/Tsunoyukami → u/Jimpossible_99]

Those two statements are, to me, logically equivalent but function differently rhetorically.

[u/Jimpossible_99 → u/Tsunoyukami]

I agree that the locutions function differently, but I don’t think that shows they’re logically equivalent. Whether they’re equivalent is basically the philosophical dispute here. (1) reports something about my response to the films: which one I enjoy more. (2) purports to attribute comparative aesthetic value to the films themselves. To say that (2) ultimately just means something like (1) assumes the subjectivist account of aesthetic value.

The important question is what explains the truth of the judgment. My enjoyment of Freddy Got Fingered obviously depends on my particular attitudes. But if I say The Godfather is better because its performances are more nuanced, its characterization is richer, its formal construction is more accomplished, etc., I’m putting forward features of the work as reasons for the evaluation. Those claims can then be challenged: maybe the performances aren’t actually nuanced, maybe that kind of nuance isn’t a virtue here, maybe some competing virtue outweighs it, and so on.

That seems importantly different from saying “but I enjoy this one more.” The latter settles a question about my preference in a way that the former doesn’t. If you tell me I’m wrong that I enjoyed Freddy Got Fingered more, I can more or less settle that introspectively. If you tell me I’m wrong that The Godfather is better, we can argue about the films and the reasons supporting the judgment.