The Empirical Case for Moral Beauty

ABSTRACT

Although formative of modern value theory, the moral beauty view—which states that moral virtue is beautiful and moral vice is ugly—is now mostly neglected by (analytic) philosophers. The two contemporary defences of the view mostly capitalize on its intuitive attractiveness, but to little avail: such considerations hardly convince sceptics of what is nowadays a rather unpopular view. Historically, the view was supported by thought experiments; and although these greatly increase its plausibility, they also raise empirical questions, which they leave unanswered. Here, I offer a novel defence of the moral beauty view, capitalizing on empirical evidence and arguing via an inference to the best explanation.

KEYWORDS:

• aesthetics and ethics
• beauty
• moral virtue
• psychology
• empirical
• eighteenth-century aesthetics

Notes

¹ See Gaut [2007: 124–7, 2010]. Elsewhere [Paris 2017b: ch. 2], I defend the conceptual and metaphysical possibility of MBV.

² One might also suspect that such usages are metaphorical, and so do not support MBV. Since McGinn [1997: 102–4] and Gaut [2007: 124–7] have addressed this objection, I will not discuss it here; anyway, my argument relies neither solely on linguistic considerations nor solely on the intuitive plausibility of MBV.

³ These can be interpreted in at least three ways:

Physically ugly (beautiful) people can … be experienced as

	(a)	physically;
	(b)	non-physically; or
	(c)	overall beautiful (ugly) in virtue of their morally virtuous (vicious) character.

The ambiguity between (b) and (c) is intended, because both are likely implications of MBV, provided that we understand judgments of beauty in the style of pro tanto principles, which can be combined in an overall evaluation. Understood thus, (c) suggests that physical ugliness and non-physical beauty, for example, can make for overall beauty (or lesser overall ugliness, provided that this is understood as an increase in beauty). Although (b) may seem odd, making talk of an experiential shift difficult to square with aesthetically evaluating different things (i.e. physical appearance and character), ‘shift’ in this case indicates a change in our experience as a whole, upon experiencing a person as both non-physically beautiful and physically ugly. This phenomenon is familiar; we undergo such shifts, for instance, in coming to experience a literary passage that was previously experienced as ugly because of the coarseness of its expression, as beautiful due to the thoughts it expresses. While (a) is not intended by (i) and (ii), I think that our overall aesthetic experience and evaluation may, as it were, colour even our perceptual experience: as suggested above, for example, although we might at first be repulsed by Merrick's deformity, as we come to know him, and see him as kind, honest, etc., we might experience even his appearance as less ugly (see also note 11).

⁴ See Gross and Crofton [1977], Urbaniak and Kilmann [2003], Lewandowski et al. [2007], Swami et al. [2007], and Zhang et al. [2014].

⁵ Likewise for ‘ugliness’ [Paris 2017a: 141].

⁶ Where ‘moral beauty’ refers to beauty predicable of morally good behaviour or character.

⁷ Possible and actual ranges for ‘natural’ and ‘artistic’ beauty were between 4–28; the possible range for moral beauty was 6–42; the actual range was 10–42. The mean scores were as follows: ‘natural beauty’, M = 20.7, SD = 5.1; ‘artistic beauty’, M = 16.7, SD = 5.9; ‘moral beauty’, M = 31.4, SD = 7.4.

⁸ Actually, the significant intercorrelations between items concerning whether people notice each kind of beauty (see previous note) effectively rule out this interpretation.

⁹ People may understand ‘beauty’ differently. But the experimental instruction should give them pause. Without good reasons to reject their usage, we should take them seriously.

¹⁰ Likewise, I take ‘unattractiveness’ to refer to ‘ugliness’.

¹¹ One might object that this is unenlightening: the fact that descriptions of personalities affect changes in people's ratings of others’ attractiveness in photographs merely evinces people's poor or unreliable judgment. This worry might stem from thinking that judgments of people's attractiveness on the basis of photographs are not reliable indicators of that attractiveness [Nehamas 2007: 64–71]. This is far from obvious, however: while subjects judging the attractiveness of someone in a given photograph might not be judging how attractive that person is overall, they are judging how attractive that person is in that photograph. The upshot of such experiments, then, is that attractiveness in photographs plus information concerning the personality of people in photographs yields higher or lower attractiveness ratings, depending on the evaluative valence of the personality information. Alternatively, the worry might be that photographs offer neither evidence for, nor epistemic access to, personality traits. Since subjects in such experiments are not acquainted with the personalities of those whom they rate, they are probably confused. It is true that people have not interacted with those whose attractiveness they rate. Still, they have access to allegedly reliable personality information, so they are acquainted with some personality fragment or other, which they can contemplate, and in light of which they can experience the photographs anew. This can be explained by the mechanism whereby knowledge about the object of our experience can condition our experience thereof, including its beauty. A considerable portion of our ordinary experience is experience-as, in this sense, and to assume that experiential shifts like those showcased above are objectionable or merely evince confusion is to beg the question against exponents of MBV.

¹² See Meskin et al. [2013: 13], although they grant that ‘preference often is an expression of what grounds evaluative appraisals or judgments of artistic value (e.g., pleasure in appreciating a work).’ This relates to my discussion below.

¹³ I am grateful to Berys Gaut and Sarah Broadie for invaluable feedback on previous versions of this paper. I would also like to thank three anonymous referees for this journal. Versions of this paper have been presented at the 2014 European Society for Aesthetics and 2015 British Society of Aesthetics annual conferences. I would like to thank audiences there, and especially Emily Brady, Aaron Meskin, and Elisabeth Schellekens. I have also presented previous versions to postgraduate seminars at the University of St Andrews. I would like to thank audiences there, and in particular Sebastian Becker and Joshua Habgood-Coote. I am indebted to the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation for a scholarship that allowed me to pursue doctoral research at the University of St Andrews, of which this paper is a partial product.