ABSTRACT
There is a difference between acting beautifully and appreciating beauty: the first is a matter of morality, the second a matter of taste. As judgements on what is fitting, harmonious and good, aesthetics have a moral character – and certainly the pointless destruction of beautiful objects raises a moral problem. Angus Ritchie is a moral realist and believes in the existence of an objective moral order that humans beings can know. The discovery of both moral/spiritual truths and of objective knowledge is a process bound up with expression in language. Meditation on the issue of why the universe is so harmoniously configured that it persists and grows and develops in complexity to the point where it becomes conscious is at the same time a way of exploring the meaningfulness of the language for science and all other kinds of knowledge about external facts that people achieve, and a way of exploring the deep question of why anything exists.
