It’s routine, Tabin, to find among trained lawyers a willingness to admit the strength of valid counterarguments. Another commonplace is the impression among conservatives that “entirely subjective aesthetic judgement” is the toxin that pumps through the veins of an addled culture — specifically, ours. You appear to have read me backwards, like a satanic verse.

Aesthetics are nonsense without moral points of reference, and that’s what culture must provide. Propriety, as the decent regulation in public of private desire, can be debated coherently in the usual way — according to reasoned argument and the artful science of rigorous thought. If you brush away the whole notion of the utility — and indeed the possibility — of that conversation, you brush away everything, my friend, including intellectual conservatism; and if that’s the ride you’re after I suggest the ticket for you is a one-way trip to the bankruptcy of any and all humane aesthetics.