Practical Beauty

In this dissertation, I defend a contemporary uptake of the traditional association of Goodness and Beauty, offering a naturalistic account of their formal unity through the development of the judgmental activity oriented toward these values. Recognizing this unity requires that we attend to the primary mode of judgment in each normative domain: the agent of moral value and the spectator of aesthetic value. While judgments realizing moral value are essentially productive and judgments articulating appreciation of aesthetic value are essentially disinterested, the unity these distinct forms nonetheless enjoy comes through their common reliance on a logically prior moment of thought. This moment is our ongoing struggle to make sense of our shared human nature and to feel at home in it, one struggle severally manifested in moral and aesthetic judgment.