Seems like I have a pretty basic bitch flavor of moral antirealism that is not super well captured by the literature. I've been calling it "moral aestheticism" in my head, but that makes it sound entirely too fancy and well thought-out.

A sentient creature can in theory organize the states of the universe into more and less preferable states. This seems to me a defining feature of sentience; rocks do not care where they lie, dogs prefer to lie on cool slabs of slate, etc.

My claim is this is as close to morality as we can get. This ability to order possible world states is, at most, a moral mind-dependent fact. It also happens to be exactly analogous to aesthetics: ordering the possible world states is making a claim about their beauty.

There's a weirdness to this that arises naturally: Can we sort *sentiences themselves* somehow, based on their own aesthetics? Like a higher order function of some sort?

I find myself erring towards No, actually. There is no reason to suppose any one sentience's ordering is any "more" or "less" important than another. It might not even make sense to call them all "equal", because there might need to be a sentience doing the comparison IT1stP!

(IT1stP = In The First Place)

My own aesthetics push me towards desiring a sort of matrioshka reality - one filled with many beings of distinctly different aesthetic senses. That's where this morality gets really interesting: It can play around with instantiations of other moral theories within it.

(I tried writing this as its own blog post, but it's turning out to be a really difficult thing to speak of precisely. Lot of stuff bring swept under the rug by the tyranny of my own linguistic parlor games here.)