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Aesthetic taste is one of the marvels of the human experience. It’s very personal, a means of offering and confirming identity. But it also has the peculiar quality of assuming its own superiority. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant said that judgments of taste contain within them a kind of universal insistence: when I find something beautiful, I am in effect saying that you should too.

In practice everyone knows that agreement about such things is rare if not impossible. Musical taste in particular varies wildly, and does so aggressively to boot. Blasting tunes in public is a sharp-stick version of the problem of clashing rights and desires. As you note, it often seems that the people most likely to pump up the jam also have the worst possible taste. Weird! So what to do?

Exclude for the moment those go-to-eleven types who bang out deliberately just to annoy other people. They are fiends and should be punished. That still leaves many possible good-faith aesthetic differences in your park scenario. In a train or other confined space, audible music would be a clear violation of a common good. In the moderately sprawling park you describe, the first and best option may be to seek out a quieter corner.

Otherwise, yes, you are imposing your own preferences, including silence. If you feel entitled to do that, be polite and make sure your requests are reasonable. Keep your specific aesthetic judgments to yourself. Be prepared for rebuff, possibly anger. And whatever happens, resist any temptation to smash someone’s expensive boom box, even if you can’t stand Public Enemy’s “Fight the Powerâ€� (RIP Radio Raheem, “Do the Right Thing,” 1989).

When entering a grocery store, I noticed a woman sitting outside asking for money and another woman was in the process of giving her some. A few minutes later while in the store, I noticed the same woman who’d been sitting outside grab a jar off a shelf, put it in her bag, then leave the store without paying. Should I have said something?

There’s nothing wrong with asking for money and nothing wrong in giving it. The original transaction here is simple and sound — unless, that is, you object to such use of a public space. Absent that issue, this first exchange is just voluntary charity given in response to open appeal. If the panhandler then decides to supplement the handout with stolen goods, that’s a separate matter.

You might think, knowing the woman now has some ready scratch, that she has a duty use it to purchase the item legitimately. But neither her motivation nor her financial planning are yours to decide. Money is entirely fungible — that’s its point. Once given, there is no moral claim over what happens next. That holds even for the original donor, all the more so for you.

What is your business is witnessing the act of shoplifting itself. And this might count as a special case. You have evidence that the woman is in straitened circumstances, even if she is momentarily flush. That knowledge bears on your own choices. I suggest that you have a positive reason not to rat her out to the store manager — as you well might any other casual pilferer.

Kant (him again) famously argued that it was never right to steal, even if it was bread to feed your starving family, like Victor Hugo’s miserable Jean Valjean. If you make room for hunger-based exceptions, the argument goes, you undermine the very ideas of property and trust. Well, maybe. Most of us are less strict and more compassionate. It’s one hungry woman and her jar of jam or whatever. Let it go, and finish your own shopping.

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