Disinterest

Egoism about virtue is the view that to judge an action or trait virtuous is to take pleasure in it
because you believe it to serve some interest of yours. Its central instance is the Hobbesian
viewstill very much on early eighteenth-century mindsthat to judge an action or trait
virtuous is to take pleasure in it because you believe it to promote your safety. Against
Hobbesian egoism a number of British moralistspreeminently Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and
Humeargued that, while a judgment of virtue is a matter of taking pleasure in response to an
action or trait, the pleasure is disinterested, by which they meant that it is not self-interested
(Cooper 1711, 220223; Hutcheson 1725, 9, 2526; Hume 1751, 218232, 295302). One
argument went roughly as follows. That we judge virtue by means of an immediate sensation of
pleasure means that judgments of virtue are judgments of taste, no less than judgments of
beauty. But pleasure in the beautiful is not self-interested: we judge objects to be beautiful
whether or not we believe them to serve our interests. But if pleasure in the beautiful is
disinterested, there is no reason to think that pleasure in the virtuous cannot also be (Hutcheson
1725, 910).
The eighteenth-century view that judgments of virtue are judgments of taste highlights a
discontinuity between the eighteenth-century concept of taste and our concept of the aesthetic,
since for us the concepts aesthetic and moral tend oppose one another such that a judgment's
falling under one typically precludes its falling under the other. Kant is chiefly responsible for
removing this discontinuity. He brought the moral and the aesthetic into opposition by reinterpreting what we might call the disinterest thesisthe thesis that pleasure in the beautiful is
disinterested (though see Cooper 1711, 222 and Home 2005, 3638 for anticipations of Kant's
re-interpretation).
According to Kant, to say that a pleasure is interested is not to say that it is self-interested in the
Hobbesian sense, but rather that it stands in a certain relation to the faculty of desire. The
pleasure involved in judging an action to be morally good is interested because such a judgment
issues in a desire to bring the action into existence, i.e., to perform it. To judge an action to be
morally good is to become aware that one has a duty to perform the action, and to become so
aware is to gain a desire to perform it. By contrast, the pleasure involved in judging an object to
be beautiful is disinterested because such a judgment issues in no desire to do anything in
particular. If we can be said to have a duty with regard to beautiful things, it appears to be
exhausted in our judging them aesthetically to be beautiful. That is what Kant means when he
says that the judgment of taste is not practical but rather merely contemplative (Kant 1790,
95).
By thus re-orienting the notion of disinterest, Kant brought the concept of taste into opposition
with the concept of morality, and so into line, more or less, with the present concept of the
aesthetic. But if the Kantian concept of taste is continuous, more or less, with the present-day
concept of the aesthetic, why the terminological discontinuity? Why have we come to prefer the
term aesthetic to the term taste? The not very interesting answer appears to be that we have
preferred an adjective to a noun. The term aesthetic derives from the Greek term for sensory
perception, and so preserves the implication of immediacy carried by the term taste. Kant
employed both terms, though not equivalently: according to his usage, aesthetic is broader,
picking out a class of judgments that includes both the normative judgment of taste and the nonnormative, though equally immediate, judgment of the agreeable. Though Kant was not the first
modern to use aesthetic (Baumgarten had used it as early as 1735), the term became
widespread only, though quickly, after his employment of it in the third Critique. Yet the
employment that became widespread was not exactly Kant's, but a narrower one according to
which aesthetic simply functions as an adjective corresponding to the noun taste. So for

example we find Coleridge, in 1821, expressing the wish that he could find a more familiar
word than aesthetic for works of taste and criticism, before going on to argue:
As our language contains no other useable adjective, to express coincidence of form, feeling,
and intellect, that something, which, confirming the inner and the outward senses, becomes a
new sense in itself there is reason to hope, that the term aesthetic, will be brought into
common use. (Coleridge 1821, 254)
The availability of an adjective corresponding to taste has allowed for the retiring of a series of
awkward expressions: the expressions judgment of taste, emotion of taste and quality of
taste have given way to the arguably less offensive aesthetic judgment, aesthetic emotion,
and aesthetic quality. However, as the noun taste phased out, we became saddled with other
perhaps equally awkward expressions, including the one that names this entry.