A person’s moral attractiveness is reflected in their character. For instance, generosity is morally appealing. The idea of moral beauty has existed since antiquity, but mainly in the eighteenth century, when it became a common concept in esthetic and moral thought. Today, we have a tendency to believe that moral beauty discussions are purely symbolic. The possibility that moral judgments are influenced by a person’s merely physical appearance, which is not always ethically significant, is one literal interpretation of the term “moral beauty.”
First, we need to understand the differences between moral and immoral physical beauty. Second, we require a justification for how moral beauty may communicate moral virtue without conflating the two. By fulfilling these requirements, moral beauty is kept separate from non-moral beauty and/or moral virtue. Thus, the ethically important kind of beauty and the morally unimportant kind of beauty are separated. This makes it possible to have a secure, literal understanding of moral beauty, which aids in defending many of our moral judgements based on aesthetic worth.
Human beings have long equated goodness and beauty. The connection was drawn by philosophers like Socrates and Kant, and even a cursory look at some of the most well-known morality paintings reveals that many artists presume you already know that attractive people are good and ugly people are horrible. According to one myth from ancient Greece, Phryne, a lady who was accused of impiety, utilised her beauty to claim that she was beloved by the gods and could not have done the crime because of this. She was exonerated.
In-depth studies on the subject date back to the 1970s, but the idea that good things come to those who are attractive has been examined for the past few decades. According to the research, individuals are more inclined to believe an attractive stranger is kind, sincere, and charitable. Additionally, it is assumed that those who are attractive are more intelligent, wiser, socially adept, and overall higher functioning.
Before you begin to think that you’d never make a snap judgement about someone based just on their appearance, the research reveal that you probably do it frequently – extremely quickly and without fully realising it.
This prejudice has effects in the actual world. Simulated juries are less inclined to convict the attractive, and if they do, they are more likely to receive light sentences. When compared to those who have what George Carlin called “serious beauty deficits,” people tend to support politicians who are more attractive, promote subordinates who are more attractive, and even pay more attention to attractive youngsters.
Francis Hutcheson and Immanuel Kant are two philosophers who have distinguished between morality and beauty throughout philosophy’s history. However, this distinction doesn’t really imply that there is no connection between them. Beauty has somehow come to be linked with the superficial or the elite, whereas morality is seen as a more important subject to discuss, especially in more scholarly circles. However, topics related to beauty are quite prevalent in larger culture. Part of the issue appears to be the idea that physical beauty is the limit of human beauty. Because it is the first thing we perceive about other people, physical appearance is significant. But we must acknowledge the obvious truth that the bodily is not the full person.
The history of how morality and beauty separated is intricate. Francis Hutcheson’s description of “beauty” as “disinterested pleasure” is a good place to start. We enjoy the sight of a lovely urn when we see one, not since we own it or because your child made it. We like simply gazing at it; we find it impossible to look away. We are not personally involved. Our emotions are unbiased in the way that we anticipate a judge in a legal proceeding to be unbiased. In other words, it does not imply “not interested,” but rather interest that is motivated by factors other than self-interest.
However, this relatively innocent definition of “disinterest” was broadened to include independence from moral and intellectual interests, most famously in Immanuel Kant’s concept of “free beauty.” Here, Kant was primarily considering the beauty of nature, but he was misunderstood by prominent thinkers like Madame de Stael and Benjamin Constant, who did so in a way that gave rise to the concept of “art pour art.” This battle cry, which was supported by writers like Théophile Gautier, applauded art’s lack of utility. The most obvious quality of a piece of art might be characterised as uselessness, according to Paul Valéry. It goes without saying that since morality has immeasurable societal value, it is not within the purview of art.
These ideas evolved into formalism of many kinds in the 20th century, such as Clive Bell’s significant form theory and autonomism, which was advocated, among others, by Monroe Beardsley, who was once referred to as “the Dean of American Aesthetics” by the eminent philosopher Nelson Goodman. Although formalism and autonomism did not specifically use the language of beauty, they did inherit some of its key concepts, such as the separation of art and morality.
There are undoubtedly a variety of elements that contributed to this separation’s emotion. The nineteenth-century materialism, which reduced everything worth to use value, and the bourgeois consumerist culture that accompanied, were both attacked by praising the useless nature of art. The assertion of autonomy also acted as a check against the prospect of censorship, as shown most recently in the formalist defence of Robert Mapplethorpe’s images in the 1990 Cincinnati obscenity trial.
