Do You Want Other People to Share Your Preferences?
1.0 Overlap in the scope of moral and taste standards
When discussing metaethics, people often make comparisons to matters of taste. One of these comparisons is in terms of scope and imposition: who those standards apply to and, on normative grounds, whether or not and to what extent it is good (or even mandatory) to impose those standards on others. One of the paradigmatic distinctions between morality and aesthetic matters is that we typically want to impose our standards on others: we want moral rules against stealing and defrauding and killing to be maintained and enforced, if not by the law, then by social condemnation. Conversely, we are expected to have little interest in imposing our taste preferences on others. I would not support laws criminalizing chocolate ice cream (I prefer vanilla) or listening to Drake (I prefer not listening to Drake).
While this is generally true, I don’t believe that there is a sharp, categorical divide: moral norms are to be imposed on others, while taste preferences aren’t. Rather, speaking for myself, and, I hypothesize, many other people, there’s a bit of overlap between the moral and taste domains, such that for many of us:
There is an extent to which we are sympathetic to or outright support at least some degree of imposition of our taste preferences on others, including our preferences in music, art, food, and entertainment.
There is an extent to which we are reluctant to or outright opposed to the imposition of certain moral standards we ourselves follow on others; this reluctance or opposition is often context dependent as well, i.e., we wouldn’t want to impose certain standards on others given their cultural background, age, or other characteristics.
2.0 The imposition of value
This partial overlap certainly applies to me. While I don't want to pass laws banning music I dislike, and I don't scream in outrage at people for appreciating paintings I find awful, it's not entirely true that I have no interest at all in what other people enjoy, or wouldn’t support at least some pressure to impose my preferences on others. If there were a public vote on what kind of architecture to emphasize in my town or nation, I would enthusiastically favor certain choices and oppose others. I don’t have to taste the food you eat, but I do have to look at the buildings you build. So there are personal stakes here.
Yet even when there are no direct personal stakes, I still care up to a point about what music others like, and what food they like. There are practical reasons for such attitudes.
One of these benefits is that this creates a greater demand for those things. If the kind of music you like is popular, more of it will be produced, and more talented people will be drawn to producing it, so it will be of better quality. This generalizes: if you love Thai food, but everyone else hates it, good luck finding a good Thai restaurant, or ingredients at the store to make pad see ew.
A second benefit is community. When people like the things you like, they build communities around those things. This can provide additional avenues to extract value from your preferences. You won’t just enjoy bigger and better restaurants, concerts, and art galleries, but will find people in these places, and online communities where you can discuss your shared interests, make friends, and explore and appreciate the things you enjoy in ways that would be unavailable if your preferences were less popular.
A third benefit is that you can enjoy greater social approval of your preferences if they are widely accepted as mainstream. You are less likely to be bullied, harassed, condemned, or ostracized for liking things that are popular, because popular things are more likely to be accepted.
There are probably more benefits, but my point is simply that we all have a practical interest in other people sharing our preferences. Has a restaurant you really liked ever closed down for lack of business? Not enough people shared your preferences. Has a store stopped carrying a product you really liked? Not enough people shared your preferences. Have musicians you loved quit due to lack of success, or failed to influence new bands to produce similar music? Not enough people shared your preferences. Ever seen buildings or architecture or clothing or just about anything else around you that you found personally hideous or at least unappealing? Not enough people shared your preferences.
Now, this isn’t to say that we’d all want everyone, everywhere, to have exactly the same preferences as us. One can appreciate a plurality of perspectives and preferences for their own sake (I certainly do). And one can be happy that people with different preferences are able to have those preferences satisfied. One need not want everyone to like the same music or like the same food, but there is, plausibly, a minimum threshold of others liking the same things as you that would be important to maintaining the accessibility of the product in question. If nobody else orders your favorite dish on the menu, the restaurant is going to stop serving it.
Even so, there are clear and straightforward reasons why others sharing your interests benefits you. So this provides at least one practical reason to want others to share your taste preferences (at least up to a point).
However, have you ever found yourself judging others for liking bad stuff? Bad music, bad food, bad art, bad fashion, bad…whatever? Perhaps we should all just shut up and be okay with other people’s preferences. And perhaps that is the best norm to abide by, aside from disliking preferences that actively cultivate negative externalities, e.g., other people enjoying cigarettes is harmful to the rest of us. However, as a matter of descriptive fact, I’m not convinced most people actually feel this way. I suspect if you asked them, and could perhaps circumvent any barriers to honesty, many people would acknowledge that they judge other people for at least some preferences. People may think less of someone for enjoying trite pop music, or eating lots of fast food, for instance. But I also suspect people would, up to a point, favor at least some actions that would lessen or prohibit such activities.
3.0 The non-imposition of moral value
Conversely, people will often say that some actions are “a personal choice.” This does not mean that the person in question must be a moral relativist or a moral antirealist. Rather, people may simply hold the normative moral standard that with respect to the possible courses of action a person might take in a given situation, that multiple, mutually exclusive courses of action are all morally permissible. For instance, a person may believe the following:
I personally believe it is wrong to get an abortion and I would not do so, but it is morally permissible for others to do so in the first trimester of a pregnancy.
This may seem internally contradictory. And it could be, if by “it is wrong” the person means “it is not permissible for anyone to do so.” This would conflict with the position that it is permissible for others to do so. Yet people often speak imprecisely or in ways that don’t accord with standard ways philosophers phrase things. It is possible to think that an action is morally bad but still permissible, and perhaps this is what such a person thinks.
Or they might simply be opposed to getting an abortion but understand why others would do so. Or they might think it is wrong to do so (and, in a certain sense, “impermissible,” or something one “ought not do,”) but also believe that doing so should not result in punishment or condemnation. There are many things someone could think on the matter that are consistent with them being a moral realist.
In short, there are moral issues for which we may have a moral stance, but not want to impose that moral stance on others, either through condemnation or the law.
4.0 Blurred boundaries
Moral norms are often treated as categorically distinct or sui generis. Even when they aren’t viewed this way, they’re often treated as at least very distinctive. But perhaps the way in which they differ from other norms is more a matter of degree than a fundamental or qualitative difference. I’ve never run a poll on Substack, but I am curious what you think. So I’d like to pilot that feature by asking you what you think. In addition to responding to the poll below, feel free to leave a comment explaining your perspective as well.
How or why one enjoys aesthetics is important to the good life. Most often, I judge people for being overly negative about an aesthetic experience. Artistic empathy is a moral good.
I suspect a lot of judgments about other people's taste preference are often a form of character judgment, so in the virtue ethics sense they might also be moral judgment.
If someone likes playing gacha mobile games with microtransactions pop up every two minute, PC/Console gamers who play the likes of RDR2 and Elden Ring might judge them badly, because either their choice reflects an incompetency in finding good games to play (and thus incompetency in probably other domains including moral beliefs), or it reflects their feeble-mindedness and other vices for succumbing to the cheap mental tricks of gacha games.
Or consider someone who otherwise eats meat but not offals. People who eat offals might dislike them even tho technically it's none of their business, because it could reflect a type of culinary bigotry, from which they may deduce a general closed-mindedness on the part of the offal-abstainer. And if they are bigots in food, who's to say they aren't bigots in other things like sexuality or nationality as well! This might be the thought process (maybe unconscious and automatic) behind many preference judgments, which is basically how people judge people's virtues and characters in other moral judgments.