"There's no accounting for taste," the saying goes, yet people argue about films and songs as if someone could be wrong. If beauty is only a feeling, those arguments make no sense. If it is a fact, why do sensible people disagree so much? Two eighteenth century philosophers, David Hume and Immanuel Kant, gave answers that still shape the debate.

Hume's problem

Hume took the puzzle head on in his 1757 essay "Of the Standard of Taste." He granted the subjectivist a great deal: "Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty." Yet he noticed that we do not treat all opinions as equal. Anyone who claimed that the minor poet John Ogilby equalled John Milton, he wrote, would be defending an extravagance as great as calling "a mole-hill to be as high as TENERIFFE," the great peak of the Canary Islands.

So Hume looked for a standard in people rather than in objects. Some responses are better informed than others. Hume located the standard of taste in the joint verdict of true judges, and he described them in a famous sentence: "Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character." The ideal critic therefore has five qualities: good sense, delicacy, practice, a wide basis of comparison, and freedom from prejudice.

The wine and the key

To explain delicacy, Hume retold a story from Don Quixote. Two of Sancho Panza's kinsmen are asked to judge a cask of wine. One says it is good but tastes slightly of leather; the other says it is good but tastes slightly of iron. Everyone laughs at them, until the cask is emptied and an old key on a leather thong is found at the bottom. Hume's point was that delicate taste detects real qualities that others miss. The kinsmen were not inventing their reactions; they were picking up something actually in the wine.

Hume added a test that does not depend on any single critic: time. "The same HOMER who pleased at ATHENS and ROME two thousand years ago, is still admired at PARIS and at LONDON." For Hume, lasting admiration across ages and nations is strong evidence of real merit, because fashions, flattery and prejudice fade, while genuine excellence keeps pleasing.

Critics raise two problems. The first is a circle: we pick out the true judges by their good taste, but we define good taste as whatever the true judges like. The second Hume admitted himself: some differences, such as a young person's love of passionate works and an older person's preference for wise ones, may have no right answer at all.

Kant's judgment of taste

Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment, published in 1790, came at the question from another angle. He asked what is special about saying "this is beautiful" compared with "this is pleasant." If I say a drink is pleasant to me, I do not expect you to agree. For Kant, calling something beautiful claims the agreement of everyone: I speak, as he put it, with a universal voice.

Kant described the judgment of beauty through several features. It is disinterested: a disinterested judgment, for Kant, does not depend on any desire to own, use or consume the object. A hungry person admiring a painted banquet may be thinking about dinner, not beauty. Next, a judgment of beauty is universal, yet it rests on no concept or rule, so no argument can force you to find something beautiful; you have to look for yourself. Finally, a beautiful thing seems designed to suit our minds even though we can name no use it serves, a quality translators render as purposiveness without purpose.

Why should a judgment based on feeling claim everyone's agreement? Kant answered that beauty arises from a free play of imagination and understanding, mental powers that all humans share. Because everyone has the same basic faculties, a pleasure that comes from their harmony ought, in principle, to be open to all.

Why it matters

Both thinkers tried to steer between dogmatism, in which one authority settles taste, and relativism, in which no one can ever be wrong. Kant's picture of taste as something we share as equals, and must work out together by looking and talking rather than by command, inspired Friedrich Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), which argued that training in beauty helps prepare people for political freedom.

Worked example: arguing about a film

Maya says a new film is a masterpiece; Leo calls it boring. A pure subjectivist would end the conversation there. Hume suggests better questions. Has each of them seen enough films of this kind to compare? Was Leo exhausted, or is Maya a devoted fan of the director? Did either miss something, like the key in the wine? Kant adds a check on motives: is Maya's praise really about the film, or about her crush on the lead actor? Then both must point to features others can see for themselves, such as the pacing of a scene or the way a repeated image changes meaning. They may still disagree. But the quarrel has become an exchange of reasons, and one of them may come to see what the other saw.