I’m making a fairly strong claim (weakly held) that “is it beautiful or ugly?” is at least one of the important questions to be asking, in addition to “is capitalism good/bad” and “does raising minimum wage help or harm workers?”. Not because it’s how a flawless AI would think about it, but because it’s how humans seem to often think about it.
What is an aesthetic?
An aesthetic is a mishmash of values, strategies, and ontologies that reinforce each other.
I suspect it’s because these are really all the same thing, unified by a common mental mechanism. “Aesthetic” is as good a name for the natural category as any.