 A question for Shaftesbury is whether his metaphysical view of the property of beauty is conceptually prior to his epistemological view of our discernment of beauty, or vice versa. We might, in other words, ask him: in a world in which we were built to like disharmonious things, would we all be wrong about what is beautiful (metaphysics prior), or would disharmonious thing be in fact beautiful (epistemology prior)? Shaftesbury’s texts may not provide a perfectly clear answer to this question, but there is certainly evidence that he would want to say that the metaphysics is prior. For he wanted to be a “Realist in Morality,” where realism involves “immutable” and “eternal Measures” of morality that are independent of any mind (C 2.267; 2.36). Such mind-independent moral measures are necessary for Shaftesbury’s refutation of what he takes to be the pernicious subjectivism of Hobbes and the despicable voluntarism of the Calvinists. And he explicitly equates the metaphysical status of moral beauty with the beauty of objects. Here’s a passage in which he makes an emphatic statement that seems to affirm the mind-independence of beauty in general and of moral beauty in particular.