De Quincey is not, of course, advocating murder or really trying to make murder socially acceptable, let alone desirable. But his ironic essays raise an interesting point: once aesthetics is detached from some universal understanding of what it means to be human, from some universally authoritative moral metanarrative, from some solid ground in a larger metaphysical reality, then aesthetics is king. Taste can drive what we think to be right and wrong. Ethically speaking, taste becomes truth.
