The objectivity question

Offnotesnotes asks "can music be objectively good?" and Tom repeats the question and Daddino and I comment. Sane people tend to flee such discussion, but I don't, and this was my two cents:

Well, a problem is that the word "objective" has an air of precision about it but it's actually vague and problematic as all shit, and Marc never told us or figured out what he was asking. A connotation of "objective" is that everyone who has access to the same facts or data or sense impressions and isn't mentally deficient and is willing to do the work must come to the same conclusion, and we can't imagine that they wouldn't. Generally, the word that "objective" attaches to is "true" rather than "good," the distinction supposedly being that we can - or, once we know more about tides and winds and such, we will be able to - determine objectively whether a dike in or near New Orleans can withstand Category Four or Category Five hurricanes. Whereas whether New Orleans is worth the trouble of protecting and preserving, and what about New Orleans you want to protect and preserve, and whether dikes are the way you want to do it (rather than, say, moving the city periodically) are generally considered value judgments, which are supposedly the sort of thing that we can imagine disagreeing about, no matter how much data we collect.

( Objective and subjective must die )

Opportunity to tell someone on my flist your age and gender

Returned from Switzerland, petronia requests that you help her by taking her survey, the due date for which apparently does not wait upon sojourns in small countries with high altitudes. It is about withholding support for paying for music, but doesn't require that you do so yourself.