Black Bucket Essays
Volume 1, Issue 6
"Ethics and aesthetics are one"
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
Leah Cooper
The following essay is a brief summary of my thoughts on Hummers, McMansions, and green lawns in a drought.
In the most basic sense, ethics and aesthetics are both systems of value; aesthetics being grounded in the notion of the beautiful and thus by default a determination of what is ugly and ethics a branch of philosophy dealing with what is morally right or wrong.
Is what we deem aesthetically valuable or beautiful a reflection of what we believe to be right or wrong?
Within the past two weeks I have seen the following:
-a luxury SUV known as a Hummer being driven around the streets of Baltimore.
- a new development of large houses on what was recently wide-open rural hillsides in West Virginia.
- an aerial photo of a mansion surrounded by lush landscaping taking the form of a green island floating inside the brown drought ridden land of Southern California.
Why would one drive a gas guzzling civilian version of a military vehicle? Its impractical, its grandiose, its absurd, and it is ugly.
What makes someone build a mcmansion on a hill when the fuel to run it is running out? Its wasteful, its unsustainable, its pretentious, and it is ugly.
How does one justify watering an enormous chunk of land when there is no water? Its extravagant, its reckless, its selfish, and it is ugly.
As the saying goes, ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, so it stands to reason that each of these items was purchased, built, or cultivated because someone thought them beautiful and valuable.
Yet I would agree with Ernst Gombrich’s assertion that there is no ‘innocent eye’. ‘(The eye) functions not as an instrument self-powered and alone, but as a dutiful member of a complex and capricious organism. It select, rejects, organizes, discriminates, associates, classifies, analyzes, constructs. Nothing is seen nakedly or naked’
I thought the hummer, the mcmansion, and the green lawn each to be ‘wrong’, ethically bankrupt, and in my eyes ‘ugly’.
"What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did."
— Peter Singer
Volume 1, Issue 6
"Ethics and aesthetics are one"
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
Leah Cooper
The following essay is a brief summary of my thoughts on Hummers, McMansions, and green lawns in a drought.
In the most basic sense, ethics and aesthetics are both systems of value; aesthetics being grounded in the notion of the beautiful and thus by default a determination of what is ugly and ethics a branch of philosophy dealing with what is morally right or wrong.
Is what we deem aesthetically valuable or beautiful a reflection of what we believe to be right or wrong?
Within the past two weeks I have seen the following:
-a luxury SUV known as a Hummer being driven around the streets of Baltimore.
- a new development of large houses on what was recently wide-open rural hillsides in West Virginia.
- an aerial photo of a mansion surrounded by lush landscaping taking the form of a green island floating inside the brown drought ridden land of Southern California.
Why would one drive a gas guzzling civilian version of a military vehicle? Its impractical, its grandiose, its absurd, and it is ugly.
What makes someone build a mcmansion on a hill when the fuel to run it is running out? Its wasteful, its unsustainable, its pretentious, and it is ugly.
How does one justify watering an enormous chunk of land when there is no water? Its extravagant, its reckless, its selfish, and it is ugly.
As the saying goes, ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, so it stands to reason that each of these items was purchased, built, or cultivated because someone thought them beautiful and valuable.
Yet I would agree with Ernst Gombrich’s assertion that there is no ‘innocent eye’. ‘(The eye) functions not as an instrument self-powered and alone, but as a dutiful member of a complex and capricious organism. It select, rejects, organizes, discriminates, associates, classifies, analyzes, constructs. Nothing is seen nakedly or naked’
I thought the hummer, the mcmansion, and the green lawn each to be ‘wrong’, ethically bankrupt, and in my eyes ‘ugly’.
"What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did."
— Peter Singer
