As I continue with the Penguin Little Black Classics, what is becoming clearer is not just the range of material within the series, but the way each book alters the manner of engagement. So far, there has been no continuity of form. Each one seems to reset the expectation of what reading is supposed to do. The fifth one was aphorisms, each thought leading the reader to ponder something deeper. The sixth one takes this in a different direction. It moves away from story and even from structured thought. It places the reader in the middle of an argument that is less about arriving at a conclusion and more about what it reveals along the way.

With this, I find myself reading John Ruskin. Before getting to this book, I had not heard of him. So naturally I looked him up. In fact, that is one grouse that I have with the Penguin Little Black Classics. There is no author intro. Writing in the 19th century, he began with art and architecture, but gradually moved toward the conditions that shape them. For him, what people create and what they admire are not separate from how they live, and taste, in that sense, is not merely preference but an indication of something deeper.

This short volume contains two pieces. The first, Traffic, is presented as a lecture, but it reads less like a formal argument and more like a challenge. The second, The Roots of Honour, drawn from Unto This Last, shifts the focus slightly and reflects on work, responsibility, and the relationship between people within an economic structure. Ruskin questions the idea that human relationships can be reduced to transactions. He suggests that notions like duty, care, and fairness cannot be separated from how we organise labour and reward. Read together, the two pieces make it difficult to see economics, aesthetics, and morality as separate domains. They begin to appear as different expressions of the same underlying values.

The universe has a curious way of bringing ideas together. While I was reading these two pieces, I came across a recommendation in The Ken’s First Principles newsletter. It was Taste Test: Encrusting the Tortoise by Douglas Brundage. The subtitle stayed with me: AI gave everyone a generative engine. It also revealed who had nothing to say.

That, in turn, leads to a question.

What does taste reveal.

Ruskin, in his lecture Traffic, does not treat taste as something incidental. He looks at the buildings people create, the objects they surround themselves with, and the art they admire, and reads them as expressions of value. If what is chosen is imitative, convenient, or superficial, then that choice is not neutral, because it reflects a certain acceptance of those qualities. He does not separate beauty from truth, and once that connection is made, taste cannot remain outside the moral sphere. It may not be identical to morality, though he makes a very strong argument that it is. But at the very least it begins to point toward it.

Brundage’s essay approaches the same terrain differently. It speaks of a man who decorates a tortoise with jewels, layer upon layer, until the animal collapses under the weight. This image stays with you because it is not subtle. From there, the argument moves toward the present condition, where tools are widely available and images, text, and music can be generated with ease. The barrier to making things has lowered significantly. And yet, the ease of making does not seem to have resulted in a corresponding clarity of expression. It begins to feel that the limitation was not always technical.

Brundage draws a distinction between selecting and creating. He argues that what is often called taste appears, in many cases, to be the ability to recognize what is already accepted as good and to assemble it. It is arrangement rather than authorship. He takes the example of Jony Ive’s work with Ferrari. Brundage’s observation is that it simply is a rehash of Ive’s work at Apple.

Placed alongside Ruskin, the two perspectives begin to align in an unexpected way. One suggests that what we admire reflects what we value, while the other suggests that what we produce reflects whether there is a point of view behind it. And between them taste starts to take on a slightly different meaning.

It is not simply the ability to recognize what is pleasing, nor is it limited to assembling elements that work together. It seems closer to a willingness to stand behind what is chosen or created.

That is where the question becomes less aesthetic and more personal. Because if one consistently leans toward what is easy, familiar, or derivative, that preference does not remain contained within objects or images but begins to shape judgment. And if one leans toward depth, clarity, or something less immediately rewarding, that too begins to leave its mark.

Even though Ruskin makes a strong argument that taste and morality are the same, there are enough examples to show that they are not. However, it is also difficult to see taste as entirely neutral. It functions less like a single decision and more like a pattern. Over time these patterns become tendencies, and tendencies settle into something more stable.

Reading Ruskin in this context does not feel like returning to an older way of thinking, but more like encountering a question that has become sharper. As Brundage puts it, AI gave everyone a generative engine. It is now possible to make almost anything. And now the constraint is no longer external. The constraint shifts to the choice itself, in what one selects, what one makes, and what one repeats.

Ruskin might see in that a reflection of values, while Brundage sees in it the presence or absence of a point of view. And between the two what remains is not a conclusion but a direction.

Taste may not define morality, but it rarely remains without consequence.