A small disability

On the mere difference view of disability, one isn’t worse off for being disabled as such, though one is worse off due to ableist arrangements in society. A standard observation is that the mere difference view doesn’t work for really big disabilities.

In this post, I want to argue that it doesn’t work for some really tiny disabilities. For instance, about 3-5% of the population without any other brain damage exhibits “musical anhedonia”, an inability to find pleasure in music. I haven’t been diagnosed, but I seem to have something like this condition. With the occasional exception, music is something I either screen out or a minor annoyance. Occasionally I find myself with an emotional response, but I also don’t like having my emotions pulled on by something I don’t understand. When I play a video game, one of the first things I do is turn off all music. If I could easily run TV through a filter that removed music, I would (at least if watching alone). (Maybe movies as well, though I might feel bad about disturbing the artistic integrity of the director.)

On the basis of testimony, however, I know that music can embody immense aesthetic goods which cannot be found in any other medium. I am missing out on these goods. My missing out on them is not a function of ableist assumptions. After all, if the world were structured in accordance with musical anhedonia, there would be no music in it, and I would still miss out on the aesthetic goods of music—it’s just that everybody else would miss out on them as well, which is no benefit to me. I suppose in a world like that more effort would be put into other art forms. The money spent on music in movies might be spent on better editing, say. In church, perhaps, better poetic recitations would be created in place of hymns. However, more poetry and better editing wouldn’t compensate for the loss of music, since having music in addition to other art forms makes for a much greater diversity of art.

Furthermore, presumably, parallel to music anhedonia there are other anhedonias. If to compensate for musical anhedonia we replace music with poetic recitations, then those who have poetic anhedonia (I don’t know if that is a real or a hypothetical condition; I would be surprised, though, if no one suffered from it; I myself don’t appreciate sound-based poetry much, though I do appreciate meaning-based poetry, like Biblical Hebrew poetry or Solzhenitsyn’s “prose poems”) but don’t have musical anhedonia are worse off.

In general, the lack of an ability to appreciate a major artistic modality is surely a loss in one’s life. It need not be a major loss: one can compensate by enjoying other modalities. But it is a loss.

In the case of a more major disability, there can be personal compensations from the intrinsic challenges arising from the disability. But really tiny disabilities need not generate much in the way of such meaningful compensations.

Here’s another argument that musical anhedonia isn’t a mere difference. Suppose that Alice is a normal human being who would be fully able to get pleasure from music. But Alice belongs to a group unjustly discriminated against, and a part of this discrimination is that whenever Alice is in earshot, all music is turned off. As a result, Alice has never enjoyed music. It is clear that Alice was harmed by this. And the bulk of the harm was that she did not have the aesthetic experience of enjoying music—which is precisely the harm that the person with music anhedonia has.

Objection 1: Granted, musical anhedonia is not a mere difference. But it is also not a disability because it does not significantly impact life.

Response 1.1: But music is one of the great cultural accomplishments of the human species.

Response 1.2: Moreover, transpose my argument to a hypothetical society where it is difficult to get by without enjoying music, a society where, for instance, most social interactions involve explicit sharing in the pleasure of music. In that society, musical anhedonia may make one an outcast. It would be a disability. But it would still make one lose out on one of the great forms of art, and hence would still be a really bad thing, rather than a mere difference.

Objection 2: There is a philosophical and a spiritual benefit to me from my musical anhedonia, and it’s not minor. The spiritual benefit is that I look forward to being able to really enjoy music in heaven in a way in which I probably wouldn’t if I already enjoyed it significantly. The philosophical benefit is that music provides me with a nice model of an aesthetic modality that is beyond one’s grasp. Normally, “things beyond one’s grasp” are hard to talk about! But in the case of music, I can lean on the testimony of others, and thus talk about this art form that is beyond my grasp. And this, in turn, provides me with a reason to think that there are likely other goods beyond our current ken, perhaps even goods that we will enjoy in heaven (back to the spiritual). Furthermore, music provides me with a conclusive argument against emotivist theories of beauty. For I think music is beautiful, but I do not have the relevant aesthetic emotional reaction to it. My belief that music is beautiful is largely based on testimony.

Response 2: These kinds of compensating benefits help the mere difference view. Even if one were able to get tenure on the strength of a book on the philosophy of disease inspired by getting a bad case of Covid, the bad case of Covid would be bad and not a mere difference. The mere difference view is about something more intrinsic to the condition.

A schematic argument against naturalistic reductions

Here is an argument schema.

1. If X is reducible to the natural, then likely the vast improvement of natural science over the last three hundred years would have led to a much better knowledge of X.

2. If X is not reducible to the natural, then it is not likely that the vast improvement of natural science over the last three hundred years would have led to a much better knowledge of X.

3. The vast improvement of natural science over the last three hundred years has not led to a much better knowledge of X.

4. So, probably, X is not reducible to the natural.

Some options for X:

• ethics

• aesthetics

• value in general.

I think the best response would be to dispute (1), by saying that (1) is only plausible if we know how to do the reduction. The mere existence of a reduction, when we do not know how to run it, is not enough.

Maybe. But I still think we get some evidence against reductionistic theories in ethics, aesthetics and value in general from fact that great progress in science hasn’t led to great progress in these areas.

Meaning and beauty

1. Only intelligent beings and things produced by them have objective meaning.
2. Something that is objectively meaningless is not objectively beautiful.
3. The earth is objectively beautiful.
4. The earth is not intelligent.
5. So, the earth is produced by an intelligent being.

Chrome extension: Blacker Text

Web design has opted for dark grays as opposed to blacks. For a middle-aged person like me, this makes things less pleasant (and perhaps harder, but I don't have the empirical data to show that) to read: the grays not only look dimmer, but also fuzzier to me. So I wrote a simple Chrome extension that automatically snaps near-black colors to black (and near-white to white, for use on dark-mode sites) on all websites, except within links. You can adjust how close you have to be to black (or white) to snap. 

Update: Here is the FireFox version.

The result of using this extension for the last week has been a pleasanter web experience: a lot of sites look crisper, more like reading a book printed with high quality ink on high quality acid-free paper. I miss it on my phone since mobile Chrome doesn't support extensions (I am tempted to switch to a mobile browser that does support extensions, but haven't done so yet).

Eventually, if there is any actual interest in the extension from people other than myself, I may add some per-site options in case some site is broken by this. 

God and Beauty

Here is my talk from the Cracow philosophy of religion conference in September:

A third kind of moral argument

The most common kind of moral argument for theism is that theism better fits with there being moral truths (either moral truths in general, or some specific kind of moral truths, like that there are obligations) than alternative theories do. Often, though not always, this argument is coupled with a divine commmand theory.

A somewhat less common kind of argument is that theism better explains how we know moral truths. This argument is likely to be coupled with an evolutionary debunking argument to argue that if naturalism and evolution were true, our moral beliefs might be true, and might even be reliable, but wouldn’t be knowledge.

But there is a third kind of moral argument that one doesn’t meet much at all in philosophical circles—though I suspect it is not uncommon popularly—and it is that theism better explains why we have moral beliefs. The reason we don’t meet this argument much in philosophical circles is probably that there seems to be very plausible evolutionary explanations of moral beliefs in terms of kin selection and/or cultural selection. Social animals as clever as we are benefit as a group from moral beliefs to discourage secret anti-cooperative selfishness.

I want to try to rescue the third kind of moral argument in this post in two ways. First, note that moral beliefs are only one of several solutions to the problem of discouraging secret selfishness. Here are three others:

• belief in karmic laws of nature on which uncooperative individuals get very undesirable reincarnatory outcomes

• belief in an afterlife judgment by a deity on which uncooperative individuals get very unpleasant outcomes

• a credence around 1/2 to an afterlife judgment by a deity on which uncooperative individuals get an infinitely bad outcome (cf. Pascal’s Wager).

These three options make one think that cooperativeness is prudent, but not that it is morally required. Moreover, they are arguably more robust drivers of cooperative behavior than beliefs about moral requirement. Admittedly, though, the first two of the above might lead to moral beliefs as part of a theory about the operation of the karmic laws or the afterlife judgment.

Let’s assume that there are important moral truths. Still, P(moral beliefs | naturalism) is not going to exceed 1/2. On the other hand, P(moral beliefs | God) is going to be high, because moral truths are exactly the sort of thing we would expect God to ensure our belief in (through evolutionary means, perhaps). So, the fact of moral belief will be evidence for theism over naturalism.

The second approach to rescuing the moral argument is deeper and I think more interesting. Moreover, it generalizes beyond the moral case. This approach says that a necessary condition for moral beliefs is being able to have moral concepts. But to have moral concepts requires semantic access to moral properties. And it is difficult to explain on contemporary naturalistic grounds how we have semantic access to moral properties. Our best naturalistic theories of reference are causal, but moral properties on contemporary naturalism (as opposed to, say, the views of a Plato or an Aristotle) are causally inert. Theism, however, can nicely accommodate our semantic access to moral properties. The two main theistic approaches to morality ground morality in God or in an Aristotelian teleology. Aristotelian teleology allows us to have a causal connection to moral properties—but then Aristotelian teleology itself calls for an explanation of our teleological properties that theism is best suited to give. And approaches that ground morality in God give God direct semantic access to moral properties, which semantic access God can extend to us.

This generalizes to other kinds of normativity, such as epistemic and aesthetic: theism is better suited to providing an explanation of how we have semantic access to the properties in question.

Aesthetic reasoning about necessary truths

We prefer more elegant theories to uglier ones. Why should we think this preference leads to truth?

This is a classic question in the philosophy of science. But I want to raise the question in connection with philosophical theories about fundamental metaphysics, fundamental ethics, philosophy of mathematics and other areas where our interest is necessary rather than contingent truth. Why should we think that the realm of necessity has the kind of aesthetic properties that would make more beautiful theories more likely to be true?

Here are two stories. The first story is that we are so constructed that we tend to find beauty in those philosophical theories that are true. It is difficult to explain why there would be such a coincidence if we are the product of naturalistic evolution, since it is unlikely that such a connection played a role in the survival of our species tens of thousands of years ago. If God exists, we can give an explanation: God gave us aesthetic preferences that guide us to truth.

The second story is that fundamental necessary reality is itself innately beautiful, and beautiful theories exhibit the beauty of their subject matter. And we recognize this beauty. It is puzzling, though: Why should fundamental necessary reality be beautiful? The best explanation of that which I can think of is again theistic: God is beauty itself, and all necessary truths are grounded in God.

Of course, one might simply reject the claim that our aesthetic preferences between theories lead to truth. But I think that would be the end of much of philosophy.

I think that in the order of knowing, aesthetics and ethics come first or close to first.

Simplicity and beauty

Consider these two candidates for fundamental physical equations:

1. G=8πT
2. G=(8+π)T.

These two equations are equally simple. (The second has three extra characters in the above inscription. But that's just an artifact of the fact that we abbreviate "(8·π)" as "8π".) But the first equation is much more elegant. For it is elegant to multiply π by a power of two while it is inelegant to add a positive integer to π. The former just feels like a much natural expression.

There are other kinds of beauty of physical hypothesis that do not have much to do with simplicity. Sometimes, for instance, a given physical hypothesis can be characterized in two different ways: say, using a variational principle and a mechanistic story (Leibniz often talks about this). Physicists and mathematicians love this sort of thing. It definitely contributes to the felt beauty of the theory, and a theory that has such a dual characterization will, I think, be preferred to one that does not.

We like theories that tell a compelling story. There was something very compelling about Newton's idea that force is the rate of change of momentum and that the force of gravity drops off precisely in proportion to how "spread out" it is over a spherical shell at a given distance (i.e., the force of gravity is inversely proportional to the distance).

These are all aesthetic judgments, ones like those we employ when judging a piece of art or literature. "This really goes with that." "That's just a pointless plot twist."

This could lead us to non-realism about science. But I think it is better to see a tie between the physical world and our aesthetic judgments. It is, for instance, exactly the kind of tie we would expect if the world were the work of an artist whose tastes are not utterly alien to us.

Art, perceptual deployment and triviality

Works of art are designed to be observed through a particular perceptual apparatus deployed in a particular way. A music CD may be shiny and pretty to the eye, but this is orthogonal to the relevant aesthetic qualities which are meant to be experienced through the ear. A beautiful painting made for a trichromat human would be apt to look ugly to people with the five color pigments (including ultraviolet!) of a pigeon. A sculpture is meant to be observed with visible light, rather than x-rays, and a specific set of points of view are intended--for instance, most sculptures are meant to be looked at from the outside rather than the inside (the inside of a beautiful statue can be ugly). So when we evaluate the aesthetic qualities of a work of art, we evaluate a pair: "the object itself" and the set of intended deployments of perception. But "perception" here must be understood broadly enough to include language processing. The same sequence of sounds can be nonsense in one language, an exquisite metaphor in another, and trite in a third. And once we include language processing, it's hard to see where to stop in the degree of cognitive update to be specified in the set of deployments of perception (think, for instance, about the background knowledge needed to appreciate many works).

Furthermore, for every physical object, there is a possible deployment of a possible perceptual apparatus that decodes the object into something with the structure of the Mona Lisa or of War and Peace. We already pretty much have the technology to make smart goggles that turn water bottles in the visual field into copies of Michelangelo's David, and someone could make sculptures designed to be seen only through those goggles. (Indeed, the first exhibit could just be a single water bottle.) And if one insists that art must be viewable without mechanical aids--an implausible restriction--one could in principle genetically engineer a human who sees in such a way.

Thus any object could be beautiful, sublime or ugly, when paired with the right set of deployments of perceptual apparatus, including of cognitive faculties. This sounds very subjectivistic, but it's not. For the story is quite compatible with there being a non-trivial objective fact about which pairs of object and set of perceptual deployments exhibit which aesthetic qualities.

Still, the story does make for trivialization. I could draw a scribble on the board and then specify: "This scribble must be seen through a perceptual deployment that makes it into an intricate work of beautiful symmetry." On the above view, I will have created a beautiful work of art relative to the intended perceptual deployments. But I will have outsourced all of the creative burden onto the viewer who will need to, say, design distorting lenses that give rise to a beautiful symmetry when trained on the scribble. That's like marketing a pair of chopsticks as a device that is guaranteed to rid one's home of mosquitoes if the directions are followed, where the directions say: "Catch mosquito with chopsticks, squish, repeat until done." One just isn't being helpful.

Aesthetics is epistemically central

Inference to best explanation is central to our epistemic lives. Aesthetic judgments about theories are central to inference to best explanation. Hence, aesthetic judgments are central to our epistemic lives. Thus we should be objectivists about at least a part of aesthetics.

Art as discovery and mathematics as art

There is a very large but probably finite number of possible images that the human eye can distinguish. Among these possible images, it seems that a relatively small subset is very beautiful (or has some other aesthetic quality to a high degree—I'll just stick to beauty for now). One way to see that visual artist is as a discoverer and communicator of beautiful images: in that very large finite space of possible images, she discovers a beautiful one, and then realizes it. The realization makes it possible for her to communicate her discovery to others. (Of course, the tools of discovery will often not be entirely mental—paintbrushes, texture of canvas, and the like all are tools of discovery, like a scientist's instruments or a mathematician's calculator or scrap paper.) Likewise, the musician searches the very large but probably finite number of possible sequences of sounds that the human ear can distinguish for that small minority that are very beautiful, and realizing the possible sequence communicates her discovery to others.

This model of the artist as discoverer and communicator makes the artist not that different from the pure mathematician, who also searches a large space of abstracta—say, the space of proofs or the space of theorems—for the few that exhibit some property, often an aesthetic one such as beauty (mathematicians also talk of "interest", but when the mathematics is pure, that "interest" is a kind of aesthetic quality, and for simplicity I'll stick to beauty) and then communicates these to others.

How exactly the analogy between the artist and the mathematician works out depends on whether Platonism about propositions (and similar objects) is true. The musician and painter in producing sounds and paintings do not merely represent the beauty of the possible sound or image: they make the possible sound or image actual. If such Platonism is true, then the mathematician does not realize possibilia in presenting a proof or a theorem, but only represents them. In this way, the mathematician is more like a composer or a novelist whose product is also a representation of a thing of beauty, rather than the thing of beauty itself. (Of course, the inscription of a theorem or a musical composition can be beautiful—the the quality of the calligraphy, say, but this is not mathematical or musical artistry per se.) On the other hand, if Platonism is false, then we might think of the very token inscriptions of a theorem or a proof as realizations of the possibilia that the mathematician has discovered: the mathematician searches the space of possible theorem inscriptions and finds beautiful ones.

Of course the discovery model of the artist's work isn't the only model of the artist's work. I think a creation model is more common. This model lays an emphasis on producing a thing of beauty (or other aesthetic qualities, of course). But I think that the discovery model works particularly well for a composer, who can be a great composer upon composing a beautiful work even if no one performs it.

The creation model makes the artist more like God. Is that a merit or demerit of the model?

But remember I am no philosopher of art.

Butterflies

The following argument is valid:

1. Many butterflies are works of art.
2. If God does not exist, then no butterfly is a work of art.
3. So, God exists.

Note that with the progress of genetic engineering, we may have to modify (2) to "If God does not exist, then no butterfly that isn't genetically engineered is a work of art" and then strengthen (1) to say that many non-engineered butterflies are works of art.

The thought behind (1) is not just that butterflies are beautiful, but that the best way to appreciate their aesthetic qualities is to see them as works of art.

Expressivism and non-doxastic propositional attitudes

One can fear that a certain medical procedure is wrong, one can hope that one's musical composition is beautiful, one can wish that a certain action be permissible, one can intend that one's children will make the right choices, one can be horrified that someone has committed a murder[note 1], one can promise that one will gain the contract in a morally licit way, one can rejoice that the expensive painting one has commissioned is good, etc. All of these are propositional attitudes. But the objects of propositional attitudes are propositions. Hence, that a medical procedure is wrong and that one's musical composition is beautiful (and and so on) are propositions, and expressivism is false.

Some problem sentences for expressivist views in ethics and aesthetics

According to expressivist views in ethics and aesthetics, sentences like "Murder is wrong" or "The Mona Lisa is beautiful" do not express a proposition, but express some kind of an attitude. I think many propositional attitudes are problematic for expressivists. Here is one that is perhaps not: "Sally thinks murder is wrong." This, the expressivist can say, is a sentence expressing the proposition that Sally has the attitude A, where A is the attitude that she would express by saying "Murder is wrong." But some are much harder:

1. Sam knows that cheating on exams is wrong.
2. Alex is unsure whether Picasso's cubist paintings are any good.
3. The younger Augustine feared that fornication might be wrong.
4. Dr. Jones hopes that her proposed experiment is morally acceptable.
5. Mark hopes that the sculpture that he is working on will be beautiful.

Representationalism in philosophy of mind and cognitivism in aesthetics and ethics

The contemporary naturalist's best bet for an account of conscious states seems to be representationalism: reducing conscious states to representational states. For independent reasons, I am very friendly to this reduction. Let us assume representationalism.

Representational states represent reality (including the epistemic agent) as being a certain way. But now consider different kinds of aesthetic awareness, say aesthetic awe or aesthetic repugnance or beauty-appreciation. If representationalism is true, each of these states represents reality as being a certain way. But aesthetic statements like "This is sublime", "This is hideous" and "This is beautiful" are connected to kinds of aesthetic awareness. For instance it seems that aesthetic awe gives rise to statements (or exclamations) of "This is sublime", aesthetic repugnance gives rise to "This is hideous" and beauty-appreciation gives rise to "This is beautiful." But once it is granted that a state of aesthetic awareness have representational content, surely the aesthetic statement that it is naturally connected with expresses that representational content. When I am visually aware of a red cube, I say "That's a red cube" and what I say expresses at least a part of the representational content of my awareness.

Thus, once we accept representationalism in the philosophy of mind, we should accept cognitivism in aesthetics. The representational content of aesthetic awe is surely something like the sublime, the representational content of aesthetic repugnance is surely something like the hideous and the representational content of beauty-appreciation is the beautiful.

Granted, the above argument is compatible with the sublime, the hideous and the beautiful being indexical or mind-dependent. That's a matter for further investigation. But the argument does make it difficult to be a non-cognitivist if one is a representationalism.

And the same argument applies in the moral sphere. If representationalism is true, moral admiration and moral repugnance have representational content, and sure if they have representational content, that content is something's being morally admirable or repugnant, respectively.

Objection: Although the aesthetic or ethical feelings have representational content, that content is an inner state of the individual, and not the sort of thing that could be the content of aesthetic or ethical claims. Imagine the content of aesthetic awe is the fluttering of the heart (no doubt it's something more subtle). Then representationalism is satisfied. But plainly the fluttering of the heart is not the object of statements of (say) sublimity. We have two constraints on what could be the object of a statement of sublimity: (1) it has to be appropriately connected to the right sorts of aesthetic consciousness, and (2) it has to fit with enough other things we say. Fluttering of the heart fits with (1)--it is on this toy theory the representational content of aesthetic awe--but not with (2).

Reply: It's certainly true that the fluttering of the heart is not at all a plausible content for aesthetic statements. But likewise it is not a plausible content for aesthetic awareness. Suppose I am having a state of aesthetic awe at a performance of King Lear. The representational content of that state is not the fluttering of the heart. For then there would be no difference in representational content between aesthetic awe at one performance of King Lear and aesthetic awe at another performance of the same play. But there is, since it is a part of the awe, qua conscious state, that it is awe at this performance, and so when the performance is different, the representational state is different. In other words, the fluttering of the heart does not capture the directedness of the awe.

I think there are two routes for the non-cognitivist now. The first is to say that the object is something like the performance's causing fluttering of one's heart. But once we do this, it is hard to resist saying that the sublime just is whatever causes one's heart to flutter. I don't say that the latter is a plausible theory--but is just as plausible as saying that the representational content of aesthetic awe at the performance is the performance's causing of the fluttering of one's heart. (Interestingly, on this view, we seem to have perception of causal features of the world, pace Hume.)

The other route is to entrench and say that the conscious component of aesthetic awe just is an experience of the fluttering of the heart (say), but that we mistakenly describe this by saying it is awe at the performance. Rather, it is awe caused by the performance. I think this is not true to the phenomenology, however.

On a relativism about beauty

Consider a naive relativist theory on which, necessarily,

• y is beautiful to x if and only if x takes y to be beautiful.

This cannot be a complete theory about beauty.  After all, exactly the same theory can be given for ugliness:

• y is ugly to x if and only if x takes y to be ugly.

Since nothing has been said that distinguishes beauty from ugliness, the theory cannot be complete.  

Moreover, there is a further oddness about the theory as I've given it.  According to the theory, the fundamental concepts are relational: being beautiful (or ugly) to.  But on the right hand side of the biconditionals we have the monadic beautiful (or ugly).  If someone fully accepts the theory, she won't take anything to be beautiful simpliciter, but only beautiful to her.  So, perhaps the relativist should say:

• y is beautiful to x if and only if x takes y to be beautiful to her.

One serious problem with this is that then nothing is beautiful to the self-conscious objectivist, since the self-conscious objectivist takes nothing to be beautiful to her--she does not have any relational "is beautiful to" predicate.

And consider another problem.  Suppose I am essentially logically omniscient, so that if p and q are logically equivalent, then it is an essential property of me that I believe p if and only if I believe q.  Applying this to the biconditional, I get:

• It is an essential property of me that: I believe that y is beautiful to me if and only if I believe that I take y to be beautiful to me.

But to take something to be beautiful to me is just to believe it is beautiful to me.  So:

• It is an essential property of me that: I believe that y is beautiful to me if and only if I believe that I believe that y is beautiful to me.

But that is surely wrong: logical omniscience should not imply omniscience about my internal states.

Maybe, though, I am being too cognitivist about "takes y to be beautiful to her".  Maybe to take y to be beautiful isn't to believe anything about y but to have a certain appreciative attitude to y.  That takes care of the problem of the objectivist and the logically omniscient individuals.  

But we still have another problem.  Imagine that I love Mozart.  I go to a Mozart violin concert, and then during the intermission I get a message about a family emergency and I need to go home.  The first part of the concert was beautiful to me.  Tomorrow I hear that the second half of the concert was even better in the respects I appreciate.  I conclude that I missed some beautiful performances.  But on the appreciative attitude version of "takes", that's false.  For the second half of the concert wasn't beautiful to me, since I didn't take it to be beautiful in the appreciative sense.  

A familiar response is to amend the right-hand-side of the biconditional to replace "I take y to be beautiful (to me)" with "I would take y to be beautiful (to me) if I experienced y."  But probably not.  After all, had I stayed for the second half of the concert, worries about the family emergency and guilt that I am enjoying someone's fiddling while my home burns (literally or figuratively) would have spoiled my enjoyment of the concert.  Of course this is just a special case of the problems that go under the head of "the conditional fallacy."  

So we would have to idealize: I would take y to be beautiful if I experienced y in ideal observing circumstances.  But as the above example shows, the ideal observing circumstances need to include being in the right mental state.  We better not define the right mental state as the one in which one's appreciation is correct, since then our theory isn't subjectivist any more.  And given that what one appreciates can be so heavily dependent on one's emotional state, it seems that at this point matters are hopeless.  

And all the same goes for similar theories about morality.