Aesthetics and Ethics as Cognitive Resonance

This paper proposes a unified account of aesthetic and ethical evaluation based on the notion of cognitive resonance. Building on a previously developed model of aesthetics as a relational phenomenon, aesthetic judgment is described as an emergent alignment between configurations of the world and the cognitive structure of the observer, rather than as a property of objects or a projection of subjective preference. The central claim of the paper is that the same functional structure applies to ethical evaluation. Through a controlled conceptual translation, aesthetic terms such as beauty and taste are replaced with ethical counterparts such as goodness and moral approval, without altering the underlying resonance-based model. The result is a coherent account of ethics as a diagnostic, relational, and situated process, rather than a normative system grounded in universal principles or objective moral facts. Under this perspective, ethical judgments reflect degrees of coherence between possible actions and the cognitive–affective organization of agents embedded in specific contexts. Ethical pluralism and moral disagreement emerge as structural features of divergent patterns of resonance, rather than as failures of rationality or access to moral truth. By reframing ethics as cognitive resonance, the paper shows how several traditional problems in moral philosophy—such as the opposition between objectivism and subjectivism, the fact–value distinction, and the tension between relativism and normativity—are dissolved rather than solved. The proposed framework preserves the experiential force of ethical evaluation while relinquishing the demand for foundational guarantees, offering a descriptive and conceptually economical account of ethical life.