I’m curious about this distinction. I’m not sure Alasdair MacIntyre, for instance, would agree that it exists. Indeed, in MacIntyre’s view the “aesthete” is a “character” of the Enlightenment. MacIntyre draws the distinction thus:

At the heart of the aesthetic way of life . . . is the attempt to lose the self in the immediacy of present experience. The paradigm of aesthetic expression is the romantic lover who is immersed in his own passion. By contrast the paradigm of the ethical is marriage, a state of commitment and obligation through time, in which the present is bound by the past and to the future. Each of the two ways of life is informed by different concepts, incompatible attitudes, rival premises.

It seems to me that the correspondents you refer to, and some that you discuss in the book, are trying to have it both ways. But they must see (and admit) that “beauty and its enjoyment” point to the transcendent, or they can’t claim that their preferences have any objective ground. Aren’t those who “don’t care for the religion thing” just consumers or hedonists of a different kind?