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.