ABSTRACT
Imagine a world in which everyone likes the same things. This isn’t necessarily a world where everyone only likes Beethoven, but rather one in which there’s a wide range of aesthetic products on offer (including, say, Rachmaninoff, Cardi B, and Nekrogoblikon), but everyone agrees about which of those things are good, and about their relative ranking. Like ours, it’s a world with Shakespeare and Agatha Christie and Louise Penny and Dan Brown, but unlike ours, it’s a world in which everyone seeks out and prefers the first to the second, and so on down the list, so that only the meanest prisoners are forced to resort to The Da Vinci Code’s (2003) dubious powers of distraction. That’s not to say there’d be no disagreement, but every disagreement about a thing’s aesthetic value could be resolved.
