What saves it from being tautology is, of course, that

…goodness is relative to scarcity of ability in this case.

Gods I suck.

At one point Tristram realises that it’s taken him 364 days of writing to cover the first day of his life, so his task is actually growing, not shrinking, as he continues.

In that case I suppose the greatest book ever would be The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, I hear the lengths he goes merely to explain his own birth are quite meticulous and very laborious.

Whether someone has “good” taste – id est, likes things which are good – or “bad” taste, matters little, if at all. Though I am due to my musical ineptitude quite interested in whether my taste is good or bad, I would not care much either way, ’tis mere curiosity. Appreciation is the same regardless of what you enjoy (say, from my “oh Penderecki is rather nifty shit” to a musical theorists’ “oh wow I love what he did with the atonal scale here”).

I would, however, if the musical theorist said that Penderecki was a bad composer, have to say that I had no idea, but he probably was right.

It is of course not exactly a very clear divide. It’d be easy to say that this [->] is something pretty much anyone who can write in English could have done (and quite a few who could not); there are probably not many alive who could pull this [->] off, if any – but to settle whether Crime and Punishment or Absalom, Absalom! is the better book, might be harder. It certainly is not something as objective as whether modus ponens is correct – it is neither, however, wholly subjective, as you can be shown right (or wrong).

And of course, for Marx labor was the source of goodness. If for Kaiser aesthetics is the source of goodness, then Marx’s theory of labor value may be neatly mapped onto Kaiser’s theory of aesthetic goodness.

…naturally, we are not all equally good at judging what takes talent or not, since we do not all know equally what is hard to do or not due to differing experience.

I don’t think this means that, for example, a fiction writer is “better” at appreciating fiction. She might be better at pointing out shoddy craft, but mostly due to familiarity with the fiction-writing community and its standards; shoddiness is largely relative. It does likely mean that a fiction writer will appreciate different novels than a construction worker or corporate CEO — not more or less novels, necessarily, just different ones.