Appearance and character

1. Appearance and character Phil 250—Making Moral Decisions Irfan Khawaja Week of April 29, 2019

2. A recap: from money to character • We started with everyday, inescapable topics—money, sex, drugs. • We then looked at political topics that are both escapable and inescapable—drone warfare, the ethics of voting. • We now circle back to the everyday, but in a different sense, judgments of character. • The immediate catalyst: character-based voting and appearance. • People tend to vote for good looking and good sounding candidates. • They equate appearance with character. • That raises the question: should we?

3. The concept of physical appearance • The concept of physical appearance is simultaneously obvious and tricky. • At a basic level, physical appearance is how a person appears to the senses of another: how they look, sound, smell (in that order). • I’ll focus on looks, but don’t forget the rest. • What is tricky is the object of appearance. • What are we talking about? • Face? Body? Body parts? Face + body? Clothes? Behaviors? Words uttered? • We have to specify.

4. The concept of moral judgment • At one level, any judgment of a person, their traits, their actions that involves good/bad, right/wrong. • Arguably restricted to things subject to the person’s control. • Control Principle: • Moral judgments only apply insofar as the person judged exercises control. No control, no judgment. • We can judge a person for what she voluntarily does, not for what she is or what happens to her. • The question is how this applies to how he appears.

5. Our predicament • We pay close attention to the appearance of others. • We judge others’ appearance as good or bad. • We use these judgments for moral purposes. • On the one hand, we are told not to do this. • On the other hand, we can’t help doing it and are sometimes encouraged to. • There is no way to escape this problem but to evade it or solve it.

6. Evade it? • The problem with evading it is that we can’t evade it in our own case. • Lots of people look at you. If lots find you ugly, and judge you morally for your ugliness, you will resent them. • But if you do the same to them, you’re a hypocrite. • And hypocrisy is an internally unstable state. • The only way to evade this is systematically to deceive yourself. • I’ll assume this is wrong.

7. Potential solutions • Aestheticism: feel free to judge morality by appearance. • Anti-aestheticism: never judge morality by appearance • Pragmatism: sometimes judge on the basis of appearance, but sometimes don’t. • Pragmatism tends in aesthetic or anti-aesthetic directions. • You should try to classify where you stand.

8. Against aestheticism (1) • In order to judge someone’s appearance, we need an objective standard of physical beauty. • But there is no such standard. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But morality can’t be subjective that way. • So there is no way to judge someone’s moral character based on their appearance. Morality has to be judged, but appearance can’t be judged. • Some truth, but not all would agree that beauty is subjective. • Could symmetry be an objective basis?

9. Against aestheticism (2) • Suppose symmetry is the objective basis for judgments of beauty. • Still, morality is subject to the Control Principle. • Yet physical appearance understood as symmetry is inherited. We don’t control it. So it can’t be morally relevant. • And symmetry judgments are irrelevant to morality anyway. • This is a powerful argument, but not airtight. • Socially appropriate appearance. • Emotionally congruent appearance.

10. Against aestheticism (3) • Suppose that arguments (1) and (2) leave some cases behind. • Still, these cases seem relatively marginal. • Considering our history, it’s probably better to ignore them and reject aestheticism. • Racism • Sexism • Ableism • Ageism • The cult of beauty and stigmatization of the unattractive

11. The case against aestheticism • Many judgments of appearance are subjective. • The objective ones are irrelevant to morality: either beyond our control or just plain irrelevant to moral judgment. • Our focus on appearance as guide to morality has led to horrific historical consequences and is best avoided. • So we should do our best never to connect appearance with morality. • We should do our best to decouple them.

12. Radical anti-aestheticism • Radical anti-aestheticism makes a vice of our attraction to beauty. • It makes a virtue of suspecting that attraction. • A powerful position, but problematic if taken too far. • How do we explain the broad agreement on judgments of beauty that exists? Isn’t it absurd to deny that disfigurement is unattractive? • It isn’t true that appearance is entirely beyond our control. • What do we do with judgments of appropriateness and congruence?

13. continued • Isn’t it dangerous to close off a certain part of life because it’s too dangerous to think about? • Can we preserve our attraction to beauty without falling into racism, sexism, etc.? • Those things are dangerous, but it’s also dangerous to make beauty a taboo without explaining how an attraction to it leads to danger. • And yet the danger is undeniably there. • We gravitate toward the beautiful and shun/stigmatize the unattractive.

14. Anti-aestheticist pragmatism • The strict anti-aestheticist position has some merit, but is too strict. • The aestheticist position is much too lax. • It allows us to jump far too quickly and arbitrarily from appearance to moral judgment. • In doing so, it potentially opens the door on moral disaster. • It seems best to adopt a pragmatist position that allows some very limited room for aestheticism, but keeps it in bounds.

15. The aestheticist side of pragmatism • There are two places where it seems legitimate to move from appearance to moral judgment. • Judgments of social-role appropriateness: you have a certain social role that legitimately requires you to look a certain way. • Judgments of emotional congruence: certain emotional reactions are appropriate or inappropriate, and have to be made visible to others. • In one sense, these are very broad categories. • In another sense, a rather narrow part of life. • In a third sense, very tricky to think about. • They can both be overdone and under-done.